Maybe the terrorists that trouble Nigeria and the rest of West Africa can be contained if Nigeria leads the revival of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, ECOMOG, that restored peace to Sierra Leone and Liberia between the 1980s and 1990s.
It will be in Nigeria’s enlightened best interest to combine its anti-terrorism efforts with those of other West African countries, gain their support and make a bigger bang for every buck spent on containing the internal and external terrorists who will then have no place to hide.
Recall that the frontline nations, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and (faraway) Nigeria, provided haven, logistics support, and military training for the freedom fighters who took on South Africa’s apartheid regime.
If mere South African freedom fighters could overwhelm the apartheid system and Nelson Mandela could become South Africa’s President, a second ECOMOG Force sponsored by nations could dislodge terrorists from West Africa. A successful ECOMOG II operation will not only dislodge terrorists and terrorism, but it should also allow the economy to prosper and flourish.
It will keep the schools open and safe and defeat the retrogressive intention and philosophy of the terrorists and their sponsors to discourage the education of children and reduce the number of potential professionals who should contribute to the progress of the region.
Nigeria, or any other West African country for that matter, should no longer work in silos, trying to stop the terrorists who appear determined to subdue the entire region for their radical Islamic religious ideology.
When America (that hitherto practised the Isolationist Policy of keeping itself to itself) and Britain joined the rest of the world to fight the Second World War against Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the world received a resounding victory over Nazism and found enduring peace.
As management experts suggest, a system is a sum of its parts. So if the countries in the West African sub-region agree to act as one man to contain the terrorists within, the force of the combined will exceed that of each of the parts.
In traditional mathematics, one plus one equals two. But the output from the synergy of the combination of two entities will exceed the sum of the outcomes of the individual parts. That is, there is strength in combined efforts.
It is increasingly looking as if Nigeria is losing the war against insurgency, just as the other ECOWAS countries are, and so, it may be wise for members of the sub-region to pool resources together once again to defeat this Al Qaeda/ISIS scourge that is eating up West Africa like cancer.
The way things stand at the moment, it is going to take a wholesale sub-regional action to save Nigeria and every other country in West Africa from the creeping terrorism danger that is threatening to consume everyone in it.
It may be necessary to explain ECOWAS, which is a regional political and economic union of West African countries, out of which Burkina Faso, Mali and the Niger Republic recently seceded to form the Alliance of Sahel States.
ECOWAS was founded because the countries could not individually address certain transboundary issues, like illegal migration, smuggling, and insecurity, whereas people on both sides of each border were, for the most part, practically of the same ethnic nationalities, culture, language and religion.
ECOWAS was thus designed to forge economic alliances across the sub-region by creating a trading bloc, like the European Union, to raise living standards and promote an enduring economic development of the sub-region.
Among the protocols in the setting up of ECOWAS is the Free Movement of Persons, Residence and Establishment that grants citizens of member countries the right to freely enter, reside and work in any of the countries.
But instructively, ECOWAS is also expected to provide a peacekeeping force whereby member states can contribute resources for joint military forces that can intervene at times of political instability and unrest in member countries.
ECOWAS provides Nigeria with the platform to lead peacebuilding efforts within the region, reshape its foreign policy that has Africa as its centrepiece, project its image as the hegemon in the sub-region, and lead negotiations within and on behalf of the sub-region.
In 2003, former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal intervened after a bloodless coup in Guinea-Bissau. Also, in 2025, President Bola Tinubu swiftly acted on an urgent request from former President Patrice Talon to quell a coup in the Benin Republic.
ECOMOG, formed in Banjul, The Gambia in 1990, was originally formed as a temporary force to monitor ceasefire agreements between opposing militias in the “turf war” between contending forces in Liberia’s two civil wars.
It later snowballed into a full-scale regional intervention peacekeeping force, usually under the leadership of a Nigerian Field Commander, that kept and enforced the peace in other ECOWAS countries, like Sierra Leone and The Gambia.
The countries of North America and Western Europe had to recognise the successful peace-keeping efforts of ECOMOG that stepped in when the global community, led by the United Nations, America, Britain and (to a lesser extent) Russia and China, ignored the Sierra Leone and Liberian crises.
But if the new ECOMOG will work, Nigeria must lead the initiative to return breakaway AES countries, Burkina Faso, Mali and the Niger Republic, back into the ECOWAS fold. Together with Chad, they occupy the vast landmass of West Africa, where the terrorists are mostly resident and active.
And they are more geographically proximal to the Middle East, where Islam’s violent variant, Islamism, is generally brewed and thriving. They lead eastwards through equally restive Sudan and the Somalis, to the Islamism hotbeds of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
President Tinubu must engage more astute diplomatic experts to find a diplomatic way to pull the chestnut out of the fire of reconciling members of the sub-region into one united family and rekindle the strength in the regional cooperation that kept West Africa safe for a long time.
It is reasonable to suggest that the absence of a hegemonic force, like ECOMOG, may have given room for terrorism in the West African sub-region to take root, metastasise and remain a permanent fixture of the life of the people.
But it is rather surprising that from the beginning of the Boko Harm insurgency, and the subsequent increase and spread of terrorism in Nigeria, neither President Goodluck Jonathan nor President Muhammadu Buhari challenged themselves to explore this diplomatic masterstroke.
It would have tremendously helped the war against terrorism in no small measure if the Nigerian military and diplomatic personnel had explored the option of this region-wide peace-keeping force to end the Boko Haram insurgency and the creeping terrorism that is gradually overwhelming Nigeria and West Africa.
The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bianca Ojukwu, may be able to complement the military effort if she can finagle a diplomatic way to get every West African country to pitch in on the effort to end the horror of terrorism in Nigeria and the rest of the sub-region.
The President should speedily explore this ECOMOG route to achieve the objective of Section 14(2)(a) of the Nigerian Constitution, which provides that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.”
X@lekansote1, lekansote.com
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