The Sahel Moves Forward but Faces Serious Challenges
Vijay Prashad
ON January 2025, the three countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger formally departed from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which these three countries had helped to found in May 1975. They had provided the legal one-year notice and so the departure was not a surprise. The main reason why these three countries, which form the Alliance for Sahel States (AES), left the ECOWAS is that when each of them had a military coup from 2020 (Mali) to 2023 (Niger), ECOWAS sanctioned them and ECOWAS countries – the twelve remaining in the alliance – threatened military action against the AES states. In the lead of this belligerence was Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Benin. Since then, the government of Senegal has changed, and the new government has a less belligerent attitude to the AES. The tide seems to be shifting across this belt of the African continent.
Indeed, a new poll in Togo shows that a majority (64 per cent) of almost ten million Togolese would favour joining the AES. Earlier in the year, Togo’s foreign minister, the philosopher Robert Dussey said that ‘it was not impossible’ for Togo to consider entry into the AES. Not long after, Chad’s Minister of Communications, Gassim Cherif, told MRTV that the AES is ‘a wonderful experience’ and that ‘I think it would be a good thing for Chad to join the Alliance for Sahel States’. The poll in Togo, which has not had a fair election in a very long time, and the statement by Cherif have created some unease amongst the ruling factions in Côte d’Ivoire, where there will be a presidential election in October of this year. While the ruling government of President Alassane Ouattara – who threatened intervention in the AES through the ECOWAS – continues to have close ties with Paris, the opposition, led by former President Laurent Gbagbo had said that if he wins, then his government will strengthen ties with the AES. Large sections of Ivorians favour the AES project and would like to see fewer firm ties with France.
Both Guinea and Ghana, which are on the two sides of Côte d’Ivoire have developed close relations with the AES project. Guinea, where the military took power in 2021 but with not as firm a political project as in the three AES states, had refused to support the ECOWAS agenda and shares some of the Pan-Africanist ideas of the AES leaders. AES states publicly refer to Guinea as a ‘strategic partner’, an important development since Guinea could provide the landlocked AES states with an opening to the Atlantic Ocean. The presidency of John Mahama in Ghana has changed the tide of relations between that country and the AES states. In March 2025, President Mahama visited the capitals of the AES and, while he said there had been a ‘breakdown in trust’, he committed his government to rebuilding faith. The appointment of the highly regarded Lieutenant Colonel Larry Gbevlo-Lartey as Ghana’s Special Envoy to the AES is significant. From June 2025, direct flights have begun via Air Burkina from Accra (Ghana) to Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), a sign of closer relations between the two neighbours.
France’s reaction to the AES has been utterly colonial. During his January 6, 2025 annual address to French ambassadors, President Emmanuel Macron made some very unpleasant comments. He said that none of the AES states ‘would have a sovereign state if the French army had not been deployed in this region’ to fight back against al-Qaeda. He was referring to Operation Barkhane that began in 2013, in the aftermath of France’s destabilising military operation through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation war on Libya in 2011; had France not destroyed the Libyan state, it is unlikely that al-Qaeda would have been able to sweep down into northern Mali and Burkina Faso. During his speech, Macron said, ‘I think that they forgot to thank us, but that’s ok. It will come in time’. This statement was seen across the African continent as a deeply colonial gesture, forgetting that France had barbarised this part of Africa and reduced countries like Burkina Faso to poverty (rural electrification rate was 7 per cent at the time of independence and remains low due to the lack of capital, wealth continued to be drained by a neocolonial economic structure).
INSURGENCY IN THE NORTHERN REGION
The insurgency unleashed in the northern half of Mali and in large sections of Burkina Faso continues to plague the region. In early June, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), made up of former al-Qaeda fighters and others, attacked Malian military bases including in Timbuktu, while a seemingly coordinated attack took place near the border with Burkina Faso. The AES has created a five-thousand-member force to combat terrorism across the region, using aircraft purchased from Russia and drones from Turkey. Mali’s military went on a broad offensive in various regions of the country (Douentza, Koulikoro, and Menaka), hitting hideouts in the Soussan forest and logistical hubs in the plains. As Mali’s military – with AES support – has begun to show that it can strike the JNIM units in the north, the Russian Wagner Group – which entered the country in 2021 – has now said that it has entirely withdrawn from Mali.
JNIM was formed in March 2017 by the unification of Ansar al-Din, the Macina Liberation Front, al-Murabitun, and al-Qaeda of the Maghreb. The two main forces in JNIM are led by Iyad ag Ghaly (the Tuareg leader of Ansar al-Din who had once been a member of the Malian government) and by Amadou Kouffa of the Macina Liberation Front (Kouffa, a Fulani salafi preacher, is a manifestation of the tensions between Fulani herder communities and Bambara-Dogon farmers). The JNIM is an ensemble of all kinds of grievances, between the Tuareg chieftains of the north and the Malian state, as well as between herders and farmers. Now these tensions are packaged in the al-Qaeda matrix thanks to NATO’s 2011 war, and form an intractable political – therefore, a military – problem for the AES states.
PRESIDENT IBRAHIM TRAORÉ
South Africa, the main BRICS country on the African continent, has remained largely silent on the emergence of the AES. The African Union (AU) has not made a formal statement on the AES, but in July 2024, the AU Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace, and Security Bankole Adeoye (Nigeria) said that the AES withdrawal from ECOWAS was ‘unacceptable’, a statement criticised by each of the AES member states as interference in their internal affairs. The silence from these institutions shows that their elites fear the popular groundswell of support not only for the AES project, but largely for the leader of Burkina Faso, President Ibrahim Traoré (thirty-seven years old, and a captain in the military).
Traoré – known popularly as IB – came to power in the second coup in Burkina Faso in 2022 after the first coup of 2020 failed to achieve the objectives of the popular movement in the country and of the patriotic section of the military. During his time at the University of Ouagadougou from 2006 to 2009, Traoré studied geology and was a leader in the Association of Muslim Students and in the National Association of Burkina Students (ANEB), a Marxist-influenced study body. Influenced by the Marxist president Thomas Sankara (1983-1987), Traoré uses Sankaraist vocabulary and concepts in his public appearances and dresses in Sankara’s style. Sovereignty is a key word, but hatred for the insurgency in the north is personal (Traoré comes from the Boucle du Mouhoun in the northwest). On May 4, 2023, Traoré told RTB television that the problem for the Burkinabe troops was the lack of equipment – ‘four to five soldiers for one Kalashnikov’, he complained. They did not need foreign troops, only weapons. The old regime, he said, bargained with the insurgents, handed out ‘suitcases of money’, and demoralised the troops. This was going to end. The war against the insurgency continues, but now with weapons from Russia and Turkey.
The dispute within the AES is of its social character. In May 2025, the AES created an investment bank (BCID-AES), but little is known about it. Will Traoré’s Sankaraism prevail, or will the other states devolve into some form of reliance upon foreign aid and cheap sales of raw materials? That is the central question within the countries.
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