NG-F-03: Nigeria-Sahel Relations and the Post-Coup Fragmentation of West African Regional Order — The Mali (2020), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) Coups, the ECOWAS Intervention-Threat Crisis, and the AES-ECOWAS Rupture (2020–2026)

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Version Date: 2026-06-02

Section Map

Key Takeaways (10–12 bullets, 80–150 words each).
The Pre-2020 Regional Architecture — The 1975 ECOWAS Treaty of Lagos, the 1999 Mechanism Protocol, the 2001 Democracy Protocol, and Nigeria's "Big Brother" Doctrine from ECOMOG Liberia to the 2017 Gambia Intervention.
The 18 August 2020 Mali Coup and the Assimi Goïta Trajectory — The Bah N'Daw Transition, the 24 May 2021 "Second Coup," ECOWAS Sanctions, and the Wagner-Africa-Corps Pivot.
The 23–24 January 2022 Burkina Faso Coup and the 30 September 2022 Traoré Counter-Coup — The Damiba Interlude, the Ouagadougou Youth Mobilisation, and the Russian-Flag Symbolism.
The 26 July 2023 Niger Coup and the August 2023 ECOWAS Intervention-Threat Crisis — The Bazoum Detention, the Tchiani CNSP, the 30 July and 10 August Abuja Summits, the Standby Force Activation Order, the Nigerian Senate Pushback, the Northern-Governors and Sultan Pushback, and the Diplomatic De-escalation.
The 16 September 2023 Liptako-Gourma Charter and the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) Formation — Mali, Burkina, Niger Mutual-Defence Treaty, and the August 2024 Niamey AES Confederation Heads-of-State Summit.
The 28 January 2024 AES Withdrawal Notice and the 15 December 2024 Abuja Summit — The ECOWAS One-Year-Notice Provision, the December 2024 Six-Month Transition Window, and the 29 January 2025 Effective Exit.
Tinubu's Personal Diplomacy and the ECOWAS Chair Tenure (9 July 2023 – 7 December 2024) — The Faure Gnassingbé Mediation, the Mahamat Idriss Déby Chadian Channel, the Bassirou Diomaye Faye Senegalese Reset, and the Limits of Lagos-Based Suasion.
The Consequences for Nigeria's Northern Border — The Sokoto-Kebbi Frontier, the November 2024 Lakurawa Terrorist Designation, the JNIM-AQIM Spillover, and the End of the Multinational Joint Task Force Sahel Component.
Three Contested Accounts — The ECOWAS-Tinubu Constitutionalist Logic, the AES Sovereigntist-Anti-Imperial Account, and the Structural Sahel-Climate-Conflict Reading.
Forward View — The Residual ECOWAS-AES Arrangements through 2026, the Trade and Free-Movement Question, the Currency-Reform (CFA-AES) Question, and the Spiral Index.

1. Key Takeaways

The five-and-a-half-year window from the 18 August 2020 Bamako coup against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta to the 29 January 2025 effective withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) constitutes the most consequential rupture of West African regional order since the 1975 ECOWAS Treaty of Lagos. In a span of just under three years between August 2020 and July 2023, four constitutional governments in the Sahel — Mali (twice, in August 2020 and again in the 24 May 2021 Goïta counter-coup), Burkina Faso (twice, in January and September 2022), and Niger (July 2023) — were displaced by military juntas that progressively converged on a shared sovereigntist, anti-French, and pro-Russian Wagner / Africa Corps posture. The departure of the three states formalised through the 16 September 2023 Charter of Liptako-Gourma and the January 2024 ECOWAS withdrawal notice produced a geopolitical fact unimaginable in 2019: a contiguous landlocked bloc of three states covering 2.8 million square kilometres and roughly 72 million people, sharing 1,500-plus kilometres of border with Nigeria's northern frontier, governed outside the ECOWAS legal and security architecture that had been the cornerstone of Nigerian regional foreign policy for half a century.
Nigeria's role in this rupture is over-determined by the fact that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, inaugurated on 29 May 2023 — less than two months before the 26 July 2023 Niger coup — was elected Chair of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government at the 9 July 2023 Bissau summit, succeeding Guinea-Bissau's Umaro Sissoco Embaló. The Niger crisis became, in effect, Tinubu's first major foreign-policy test as president, conducted in a regional office he had held for seventeen days. Tinubu's personal posture in the August 2023 sequence — his 30 July 2023 Abuja extraordinary summit, his subsequent advocacy of a seven-day ultimatum for the restoration of President Mohamed Bazoum, his 10 August 2023 authorisation of an ECOWAS Standby Force deployment, and his eventual recalibration toward a diplomatic track — was understood by ECOWAS officials as decisive in the moment, by AES officials as evidence of his subordination to French and US interests, and by Nigerian domestic critics as a foreign-policy adventure undertaken without National Assembly consent and without prior consultation with Nigeria's own Northern political and traditional establishment.
The 26 July 2023 coup in Niamey — in which the presidential guard commander General Abdourahamane Tchiani detained President Mohamed Bazoum at the presidential palace and subsequently announced the formation of the Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP) — was the most strategically consequential of the four Sahel coups because Niger, unlike Mali and Burkina Faso, was at the time of the coup the Western Sahel's primary remaining counter-terrorism partner. Niger hosted approximately 1,100 US military personnel including a $110-million Air Base 201 drone facility at Agadez, approximately 1,500 French military personnel redeployed from Mali after the August 2022 Barkhane closure, a German Bundeswehr contingent supporting the European Union Training Mission, and the headquarters of the G5 Sahel Joint Force (already weakened by Mali's May 2022 withdrawal). The Tchiani CNSP's progressive expulsion of French forces (achieved by December 2023), of US forces (achieved by 15 September 2024 under the May 2024 termination notice), and its embrace of the Russian Africa Corps for both regime-protection and counter-terrorism functions, ended a decade of Western-Sahel security architecture and reshaped the operational map of the entire region.
The August 2023 ECOWAS intervention-threat crisis is the analytically central episode of the entire post-2020 Sahel rupture. The 30 July 2023 ECOWAS extraordinary summit in Abuja — convened by Tinubu within four days of the Niamey coup — issued a final communiqué giving the CNSP a seven-day ultimatum to restore Bazoum or "take all measures necessary," including "the use of force." The 10 August 2023 second Abuja summit ordered the activation of the ECOWAS Standby Force. The threat was unprecedented in ECOWAS's history of post-coup interventions: ECOMOG Liberia (1990) and Sierra Leone (1997), the 1998–1999 Guinea-Bissau intervention, the 2017 Gambia intervention against Yahya Jammeh, and the 2010–2011 Côte d'Ivoire crisis had all been responses to either ongoing civil war or a refused electoral handover. The August 2023 threat against the CNSP was the first ECOWAS threat to invade a member state explicitly to reverse a coup against a sitting president. It was not executed. The reasons for its non-execution — the Nigerian Senate's 5 August 2023 rejection of Tinubu's request for military authorisation; the Northern Governors' Forum and Sultan of Sokoto's public objections; the AES Mali-Burkina solidarity declaration; the Algerian and Chadian diplomatic mediations; and the operational unreadiness of the Standby Force itself — together compose a case study in the limits of Nigerian regional power projection in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
The Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) was formally constituted by the Charter of Liptako-Gourma signed in Bamako on 16 September 2023 by Colonel Assimi Goïta (Mali), Captain Ibrahim Traoré (Burkina Faso), and General Abdourahamane Tchiani (Niger). The Charter — named for the Liptako-Gourma three-borders zone that had been the operational heart of JNIM and ISGS jihadist insurgency since 2017 — established a mutual-defence pact under which an armed attack on any signatory would be considered an attack on all, with a duty to come to the assailed state's aid by "all means available, including the use of military force." The AES was upgraded from a mutual-defence alliance to a confederation at the 6 July 2024 Niamey AES Heads of State summit, and its institutional architecture has progressively elaborated — a rotating presidency (Goïta took the first one-year term from July 2024), a planned investment bank, a planned biometric AES passport, harmonised customs and free-movement provisions for AES citizens, and the announced January 2025 launch of an AES common-television network "Bara'a". The AES is the most consequential supra-state institutional construction in West Africa since ECOWAS itself.
The 28 January 2024 AES joint communiqué announcing the three states' withdrawal from ECOWAS "without delay" was the constitutional pivot of the rupture. ECOWAS's response — that under Article 91 of the 1993 Revised Treaty of Lagos, withdrawal required a one-year written notice during which the seceding state remained bound by treaty obligations — set the technical timetable that the 15 December 2024 ECOWAS Abuja summit ultimately accepted with modification, granting a six-month transition window beyond the January 2025 effective exit during which AES-ECOWAS economic, free-movement, and trade arrangements would be negotiated separately. The 29 January 2025 formal exit date thus produced not a clean rupture but a continuing residual arrangement, in which AES citizens retain freedom of movement within ECOWAS (and vice versa) pending the final negotiated settlement of 2026, AES nationals' passports remain provisionally honoured at ECOWAS borders, and trans-AES-ECOWAS trade routes through northern Nigeria, southern Benin, and coastal Togo continue to operate under the residual framework.
For Nigeria specifically, the post-2023 Sahel rupture has produced four immediate consequences for the Northern frontier. First, the November 2024 Federal High Court designation of the Lakurawa group as a terrorist organisation followed escalating attacks in Sokoto State's Wurno Local Government Area from late 2023, with Lakurawa assessed by the International Crisis Group, ACLED, and HumAngle as operationally linked to JNIM and AQIM networks operating from the now-uncooperative Mali and Niger territories. Second, the disbanding of the G5 Sahel Joint Force (formally announced 2 December 2023 after Mali, Burkina, and Niger withdrew) and the operational degradation of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) — whose Niger contingent's reliability remains contested under the Tchiani regime — have weakened the cross-border counter-insurgency architecture on which Nigeria's Boko Haram / ISWAP campaign depends. Third, the Niger Republic's closure of its border with Nigeria (initially during the August 2023 sanctions crisis, with subsequent partial reopenings) disrupted the Kano-Maradi-Agadez commercial corridor that is the economic backbone of the Hausa cross-border economy. Fourth, Nigerian and Nigerien Fulani transhumance routes have become more militarised, with implications for the Middle-Belt herder-farmer conflict cycle treated in NG-F-01.
Tinubu's ECOWAS chairship (9 July 2023 – 7 December 2024) ended with the Abuja summit's handover to Senegal's Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who had taken office in March 2024 on a partly sovereigntist programme advocating renegotiation rather than rupture with the AES. The Faye chairship has pursued a different style — bilateral Dakar-Bamako and Dakar-Niamey diplomacy, more deferential to AES sovereignty claims, less invested in the formal restoration of Bazoum (who as of mid-2026 remains under house arrest in Niamey with intermittent reports of judicial proceedings against him for high treason). The transition from a Lagos-anchored "constitutionalist" ECOWAS posture under Tinubu to a Dakar-anchored "pragmatist" posture under Faye is itself one of the substantive consequences of the 2023–2025 rupture, and one that Nigerian foreign-policy analysts (Adekeye Adebajo, Olusegun Adeniyi, Mvemba Phezo Dizolele) read in divergent ways — as either the necessary recalibration of an over-extended Nigerian posture or as the marginalisation of Nigerian regional leadership at the moment of its greatest test.
The contested-accounts structure of this document is unusually three-cornered because the protagonists do not share a common analytical vocabulary. The ECOWAS-Tinubu constitutionalist account treats the AES juntas as illegitimate seizures of power, treats the August 2023 intervention threat as a defence of the 2001 Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, and reads the AES withdrawal as a regression that ECOWAS must work to reverse. The AES sovereigntist account, articulated through CNSP communiqués, Goïta speeches, Traoré's pan-Africanist rhetoric, and the writings of West African scholars sympathetic to the juntas (Issa N'Diaye, Olivier Vallée, Boubacar Boris Diop), treats the coups as legitimate popular interventions against corrupt and foreign-dependent civilian regimes, treats ECOWAS as a "trade union of leaders" co-opted by France and the United States, and reads the AES as the necessary new architecture of African sovereignty. The structural Sahel-climate-conflict reading, articulated by ICG, ACLED, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and academic specialists (Hannah Armstrong, Yvan Guichaoua, Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, Vincent Foucher), treats the coup belt as the political symptom of a longer Sahel-climate-displacement-and-jihadism crisis whose drivers preceded and will outlast both ECOWAS suspension and AES formation.
The 2026 forward trajectory is shaped by four convergent pressures. The residual ECOWAS-AES economic-and-free-movement arrangements remain under negotiation, with the May 2026 Abuja technical meeting and the planned July 2026 ECOWAS summit in Dakar expected to settle the longer-term framework. The AES has announced (though not yet implemented) plans for departure from the West African CFA franc monetary union, which would, if executed, be the deepest economic rupture of the post-colonial Francophone-West African order. Tinubu's domestic political constraints — the 2027 election cycle, the Northern political establishment's frustration with the AES policy posture, and the cost-of-insecurity macroeconomic burden treated in NG-E-05 — limit Nigeria's freedom of regional action. And the JNIM-AQIM-ISGS jihadist trajectory in the AES space, increasingly conducted under regime-Russian-Africa-Corps counter-insurgency, will continue to produce direct spillover effects into Nigeria's North-West and North-East. The reform-durability question for Nigeria's Sahel policy is therefore intertwined with the broader Tinubu first-term political-economy question; the two cannot be separated.
The methodological challenge of writing this document is the contemporaneity of its subject and the active information warfare on all sides. CNSP communiqués, RTN (Radio Télévision Niger) broadcasts, AES summit declarations, ECOWAS press releases, French and US State Department briefings, Wagner-linked Telegram channels, and the Premium Times / Daily Trust / Punch / ThisDay Nigerian press are all primary sources that disagree on basic facts (the precise sequencing of the August 2023 mobilisation; the existence and content of back-channel negotiations; the size and composition of Russian Africa Corps deployments in Niger and Mali). The corpus's three-account discipline is more than usually load-bearing here. Where verification is incomplete, the document tags [TBD-VERIFY]; where the account differs across sources, the document records each account rather than adjudicating. This is not equivalence — the constitutional fact of the coups is not contested — but recognition that the political-judgment questions (whether the August 2023 intervention threat was wise, whether the AES is a legitimate sovereignty assertion or a regression to authoritarianism, whether Nigeria's ECOWAS leadership succeeded or failed) are precisely the questions the corpus exists to keep open for the reader's own judgement.

2. The Pre-2020 Regional Architecture — The 1975 ECOWAS Treaty, the 1999 Mechanism Protocol, the 2001 Democracy Protocol, and Nigeria's "Big Brother" Doctrine

2.1 The 1975 Treaty of Lagos and the Founding Bargain

The Economic Community of West African States was established by the Treaty of Lagos signed on 28 May 1975 by fifteen West African heads of state, principally on the initiative of Nigerian Head of State General Yakubu Gowon and Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma. The founding bargain combined Anglophone Nigerian economic weight with Francophone West African political reach: Nigeria contributed the largest share of the secretariat budget (subsequently formalised at approximately 30%) and hosted the Commission in Abuja from 1977 onward; Francophone members brought continuity with the older Conseil de l'Entente and Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache (OCAM) cooperation networks. The 1975 Treaty's principal commitments were economic — a customs union, free movement of persons (Protocol of 1979), and (over time) a single monetary zone in the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) for non-CFA Anglophone members. Security and political governance were not central to the 1975 instrument. The geographical reach of the Community as it existed through 2024 covered fifteen states — Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo — plus the contested status of Mauritania (withdrew December 2000) and Morocco (2017 application not consummated).

2.2 ECOMOG and the Operational Doctrine of Sub-Regional Peace Enforcement

The first major operational deployment of an ECOWAS-flagged military force was the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) intervention in Liberia beginning August 1990, initially under the command of Nigerian Lieutenant General Joshua Dogonyaro and conducted in response to the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) insurgency under Charles Taylor against the President Samuel Doe regime. The Liberian deployment — controversial because it was undertaken under a Standing Mediation Committee mandate rather than a full Authority decision, with several Francophone states (Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso) initially opposed — established a precedent that ECOWAS could deploy military force in response to internal conflict in a member state. The 1997 ECOMOG Sierra Leone deployment, which restored President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah after the May 1997 Armed Forces Revolutionary Council coup, further consolidated this precedent. Nigeria provided the bulk of ECOMOG manpower, command, and funding throughout the 1990s, at a cumulative cost estimated by Adekeye Adebajo (2002, Building Peace in West Africa) at [TBD-VERIFY: between $8 billion and $12 billion across the Liberia and Sierra Leone deployments].

2.3 The 1999 Mechanism Protocol and the 2001 Democracy Protocol

The legal architecture for ECOWAS conflict intervention was formalised in two foundational instruments. The Protocol Relating to the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security, signed at Lomé on 10 December 1999, created the institutional machinery for ECOWAS military deployment: the Mediation and Security Council (MSC) with nine member states elected for two-year terms; the Council of Elders; the ECOWAS Standby Force (ESF) drawn from earmarked national contingents; and the requirement of a two-thirds Authority decision for deployment authorisation. The Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, signed in Dakar on 21 December 2001, went further: Article 1(c) provided that "every accession to power must be made through free, fair and transparent elections," and Article 45 established the principle that "in case of [an unconstitutional] change of government in a member State, the Community shall impose sanctions" potentially including the suspension of the member state from ECOWAS organs, the refusal to recognise the new authorities, and "any other appropriate measure." The 2001 Protocol was the legal hinge under which post-2020 ECOWAS sanctions against Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Guinea (whose September 2021 Mamady Doumbouya coup is treated in the corpus as a parallel non-AES Sahel coup) were imposed.

2.4 Nigerian "Big Brother" Doctrine and Its Costs

The Nigerian foreign-policy posture toward ECOWAS over the 1975–2020 period is conventionally described, by both Nigerian diplomats and external observers, as the "Big Brother" doctrine — the assumption that Nigeria's demographic, economic, and military weight in West Africa (approximately 60% of the regional GDP, approximately 53% of the population, approximately the largest single military force) carried with it both the obligation and the prerogative to underwrite the regional security architecture. The doctrine had three operational components. The first was financial: Nigeria covered a disproportionate share of the ECOWAS budget and the ECOMOG operational costs. The second was diplomatic: Nigerian presidents and foreign ministers were systematically the convenors and brokers of major ECOWAS interventions (the 1990 Liberia deployment under Babangida, the 1997 Sierra Leone deployment under Abacha, the 2003 Charles Taylor exit under Obasanjo, the 2010–11 Côte d'Ivoire crisis under Jonathan, the 2017 Gambia intervention under Buhari). The third was military: the bulk of ECOMOG and Standby Force units, the command-level officers, and the air-mobility assets came from Nigeria. The doctrine's costs were considerable. Domestic critics — including the late Bola Akinyemi (paradoxically, himself a former External Affairs minister), Femi Falana SAN, and the Guardian editorial line through the 2010s — argued that Nigeria's regional spending was unjustified in the face of domestic security crises and that the doctrine was a vehicle for elite foreign-policy prestige at popular expense. The 2023 Niger crisis would crystallise this domestic dissent in a way that none of the previous ECOMOG deployments had.

2.5 The 2017 Gambia Intervention and the Optimistic Reading of ECOWAS Authority

The 2017 Gambia intervention — in which an ECOWAS force led by Senegalese troops with Nigerian air assets compelled the departure of incumbent President Yahya Jammeh after his 1 December 2016 electoral defeat by Adama Barrow and his subsequent refusal to leave office — was widely read at the time as a high point of ECOWAS authority. Jammeh's 21 January 2017 departure into Equatorial Guinean exile, brokered by Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Guinean President Alpha Condé, and Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, came without the full deployment of force; the threat was sufficient. The Gambia precedent was much-cited in the 30 July 2023 Abuja summit deliberations as evidence that ECOWAS military pressure could secure constitutional restoration without actual invasion. What the 2017 case did not contain, and what the 2023 Niger case did, were several conditions that proved decisive: a defeated incumbent (Jammeh) rather than a deposing junta (Tchiani); a winning candidate (Barrow) prepared to return under Senegalese escort, rather than a detained president (Bazoum); regional unanimity rather than the AES solidarity bloc; and the absence of an external great-power security guarantor (no Russian force in Gambia in 2017, whereas Wagner / Africa Corps presence in Mali and Burkina by mid-2023 had transformed the calculus).

3. The 18 August 2020 Mali Coup and the Goïta Trajectory

3.1 The IBK Crisis and the M5-RFP Mobilisation

The 18 August 2020 coup in Bamako against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta ("IBK") was preceded by a six-month political crisis that began with the contested 29 March and 19 April 2020 legislative elections, in which the Constitutional Court's reallocation of approximately thirty seats to the ruling Rassemblement pour le Mali (RPM) was widely seen as electoral manipulation. From early June 2020, the Mouvement du 5 Juin – Rassemblement des Forces Patriotiques (M5-RFP) — led by Imam Mahmoud Dicko of the Haut Conseil Islamique du Mali, Choguel Maïga of the Mouvement Patriotique pour le Renouveau, and a coalition of opposition political and civil-society leaders — organised increasingly large Friday protests in Bamako's Place de l'Indépendance demanding IBK's resignation. The protests, while not directly responsible for the coup, created the political opening within which a group of military officers based at the Kati garrison outside Bamako moved.

3.2 The 18–19 August 2020 Coup

On the morning of 18 August 2020, a group of officers led by Colonel Assimi Goïta (Special Forces), Colonel Sadio Camara (later Defence Minister), Colonel Modibo Koné (later Security Minister), Colonel Malick Diaw, and Colonel-Major Ismaël Wagué seized the Kati military camp, arrested the Defence Minister Ibrahim Dahirou Dembélé and the Army Chief of Staff General M'Bemba Moussa Keïta, and proceeded into Bamako, where they detained President IBK and Prime Minister Boubou Cissé at IBK's residence in the evening. IBK was compelled to announce his resignation and the dissolution of the National Assembly in a televised address broadcast at approximately 04:00 local time on 19 August. The Comité National pour le Salut du Peuple (CNSP — the same acronym subsequently adopted by Niger's 2023 junta, though designating a different French phrase) was announced as the governing body.

3.3 The ECOWAS Response and the Transition

ECOWAS, then chaired by Niger's Mahamadou Issoufou, responded with closure of borders, suspension of financial flows, and a sanctions regime under the 2001 Democracy Protocol. A mediation mission led by former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, dispatched in late August 2020, secured agreement on an eighteen-month civilian-led transition. Retired Major Bah N'Daw, a respected former Defence Minister, was appointed transitional president on 21 September 2020, with Goïta as vice president and Moctar Ouane (a civilian diplomat) as prime minister. ECOWAS sanctions were progressively lifted through October 2020 in recognition of the transition framework.

3.4 The 24 May 2021 Second Coup

The Bah N'Daw transition foundered within nine months. On 24 May 2021, following a 14 May government reshuffle in which Defence Minister Sadio Camara and Security Minister Modibo Koné — both core members of the August 2020 junta — were removed from cabinet, Goïta's faction detained President Bah N'Daw and Prime Minister Ouane at the Kati military camp. Both were compelled to resign on 26 May. Goïta announced his assumption of the transitional presidency on 28 May. The "coup within a coup" represented the consolidation of the military faction's direct control and the eclipse of the civilian-transition track. ECOWAS suspended Mali on 30 May 2021 and imposed renewed sanctions.

3.5 The Wagner / Africa Corps Pivot and the Barkhane Closure

The Goïta regime's foreign-policy reorientation through late 2021 and 2022 produced the rupture with France that defined the subsequent trajectory. In September 2021, Reuters and Le Monde reported the conclusion of a Mali-Wagner Group contract for the deployment of approximately 1,000 Wagner personnel at a reported [TBD-VERIFY: $10.8 million per month, per multiple Western intelligence-source reports] for regime-protection and counter-insurgency tasks. The first Wagner forces deployed to Bamako and the central-Mali Ségou-Mopti theatre in December 2021. The 9 January 2022 ECOWAS Accra summit imposed a tighter sanctions regime, including a comprehensive border closure (by neighbouring ECOWAS members, particularly Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire) and a halt to non-essential financial flows. The Goïta regime responded with an 18 January 2022 expulsion of the French ambassador Joël Meyer, and on 17 February 2022 France announced the withdrawal of Operation Barkhane from Mali. The final French troops left Gao on 15 August 2022. The Russian-pivot, France-exit sequence in Mali — completed in less than thirteen months from the second Goïta coup — established the pattern that Burkina Faso and Niger would follow.

4. The 23–24 January 2022 Burkina Faso Coup and the 30 September 2022 Traoré Counter-Coup

4.1 The Kaboré Crisis and the Inata Massacre

The 23–24 January 2022 coup against President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré in Burkina Faso was driven primarily by accumulated military discontent over the deteriorating jihadist-security situation, in particular the 14 November 2021 Inata gendarmerie post attack in Soum Province in which JNIM (Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) fighters killed at least 53 gendarmes and four civilians. The Inata garrison had reportedly been requesting reinforcement and supply for weeks; the perceived abandonment of the post by Ouagadougou crystallised soldier-level resentment against the Kaboré government. Public protests in Ouagadougou through November 2021 and January 2022 demanded the government's resignation. The coup itself was conducted by a faction of mid-rank officers under Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba — head of the 3rd Military Region (Kaya) — who took control of the presidential palace and detained Kaboré on the night of 23–24 January 2022. The Mouvement Patriotique pour la Sauvegarde et la Restauration (MPSR) was declared as the new authority.

4.2 The Damiba Interlude (January–September 2022)

The Damiba regime sought initial accommodation with ECOWAS — accepting a 24-month transition timeline at the 25 March 2022 ECOWAS Accra summit — and explored a less rupturist relationship with France than Mali had pursued. Damiba retained the French Sabre special-operations contingent (approximately 400 personnel) and pursued counter-insurgency through a combination of Volontaires pour la Défense de la Patrie (VDP) auxiliary militia expansion and conventional army operations. The security situation, however, continued to deteriorate. A 26 September 2022 ambush at Gaskindé in Soum Province against a logistics convoy escorted by VDP and gendarmerie killed at least 27 soldiers and 10 civilians; the convoy had been carrying food and supplies to the besieged town of Djibo, then under multi-month JNIM blockade. The Gaskindé incident catalysed the second 2022 coup.

4.3 The 30 September 2022 Traoré Counter-Coup

On the night of 30 September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré — a 34-year-old artillery officer of the Cobra special-forces unit in Kaya — led a faction of younger officers in a counter-coup against Damiba. The presidential palace and the state broadcaster RTB were seized; Damiba was eventually compelled to resign and went into exile in Togo. Traoré's broadcast announcement framed the second coup as a corrective: Damiba had failed to halt the jihadist advance, had been compromised by French entanglement, and had to be replaced by a more sovereigntist leadership. Traoré, at 34, became the youngest serving head of state in the world.

4.4 The Traoré-Russia Pivot and the Pan-Africanist Mobilisation

The Traoré regime pursued the Mali template with notable speed. The French military presence was suspended in January 2023 and final departures completed by 19 February 2023 under a 25 January 2023 Burkina note demanding withdrawal within a month. Wagner / Africa Corps personnel reportedly arrived in Ouagadougou from mid-2023, though the Burkina junta has been more publicly cautious about acknowledging Russian deployments than Mali was [TBD-VERIFY: estimates of Wagner / Africa Corps Burkina presence range from 100 to over 400 personnel as of mid-2024 per ISS Africa and Africa Confidential reporting; the operational role appears more limited to Ouagadougou regime-protection than the central-Mali combat role]. Traoré's distinctive contribution to the AES coup-belt was the pan-Africanist rhetorical register: speeches at the July 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg ("we are men and we have to assume responsibility for our continent's future"), the 9 January 2024 Africanity discourse on decolonisation, and the cultivation of a youth-mobilisation profile across Francophone Africa that produced "Traoré shirts" and pan-African TikTok phenomena unparalleled by Goïta or Tchiani.

4.5 The Approach to AES

By mid-2023, the doctrinal convergence between Bamako and Ouagadougou — anti-French, pro-Russian, sovereigntist, and counter-insurgency-prioritising — was sufficient that a Burkina-Mali-Niger alliance had become a structural possibility. The 26 July 2023 Niger coup was the catalyst. Within days, the Goïta and Traoré regimes had issued joint statements warning ECOWAS against military intervention against Niger and declaring that they would consider any such intervention an act of war against Mali and Burkina Faso. This was the embryonic AES.

5. The 26 July 2023 Niger Coup and the Immediate ECOWAS-Chair Response

5.1 The Bazoum Presidency and Its Vulnerability

President Mohamed Bazoum had been inaugurated on 2 April 2021 as the first peaceful civilian-to-civilian transfer of power in Nigerien history, succeeding Mahamadou Issoufou after a contested but constitutional electoral process. A Tuareg-Arab from the Diffa region in eastern Niger, Bazoum was an unusual president for a state whose political-military establishment was overwhelmingly drawn from Hausa, Zarma-Songhai, and Tuareg-of-Aïr backgrounds. His administration pursued continuity with Issoufou's pro-French, pro-US, pro-EU counter-terrorism orientation: hosting French Operation Barkhane personnel redeployed from Mali, hosting US Air Base 201 and approximately 1,100 US military personnel, hosting the EU Training Mission EUMPM Niger, and concluding the December 2022 EU Military Partnership Mission. The Bazoum government's foreign-policy orientation was widely perceived within the Nigerien military, in particular within the Presidential Guard, as excessive in its accommodation of Western powers and inadequate in its rewards to the Nigerien officer corps. Bazoum had also signalled, before the coup, an intention to reform the Presidential Guard — the unit commanded by General Abdourahamane Tchiani since 2011 — which Tchiani is widely understood to have interpreted as a direct threat to his command.

5.2 The Coup Sequence (26–28 July 2023)

On the morning of 26 July 2023, members of the Presidential Guard surrounded the presidential palace in Niamey and detained President Bazoum, his wife, and his son. Initial reports through the day suggested an active attempt by other branches of the armed forces — in particular the Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Abdou Sidikou Issa — to negotiate Bazoum's release. By late afternoon those efforts had failed. At approximately 22:00 local time, a group of officers led by Colonel-Major Amadou Abdramane appeared on national television, RTN, announcing the suspension of the Constitution, the dissolution of all institutions of the Republic, the closure of land and air borders, and the formation of the Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP). On 28 July 2023, General Tchiani was formally announced as President of the CNSP and head of state. The Army Chief of Staff Sidikou Issa, after initial resistance, joined the CNSP, depriving Bazoum of any institutional pathway back to power. Bazoum was held at his presidential residence in Niamey under what the CNSP described as "house arrest" and what international human-rights organisations described as illegal detention.

5.3 The 30 July 2023 ECOWAS Extraordinary Summit

President Tinubu, in his capacity as ECOWAS Chair (assumed 9 July 2023), convened an extraordinary summit of the Authority of Heads of State and Government in Abuja on 30 July 2023, four days after the coup. The summit was attended by the heads of state or government of all ECOWAS members except Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Niger itself (all four had been suspended under the 2001 Protocol). The final communiqué, issued at the close of the summit, was the most aggressive ECOWAS post-coup response in the organisation's history. It demanded the immediate release of Bazoum, the restoration of the constitutional order, and the return of Bazoum to the presidency. It imposed comprehensive sanctions: closure of land and air borders, suspension of all commercial and financial transactions, freezing of Niger's assets at the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) and within ECOWAS member-state banking systems, and a halt to electricity supply (Niger imports roughly 70% of its grid electricity from Nigeria via the Birnin-Kebbi line and the Katsina interconnection). Critically, the communiqué set a seven-day ultimatum — to expire 6 August 2023 — for the CNSP's compliance, with the threat that "in the event the demands of the Authority are not met within seven days, take all measures necessary to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Niger. Such measures may include the use of force." Tinubu's signature on the communiqué as Chair was the most consequential foreign-policy act of his first weeks in office.

5.4 The Nigerian Senate Pushback (3–5 August 2023)

President Tinubu, on 4 August 2023, formally requested the Nigerian Senate's authorisation for the deployment of Nigerian troops to participate in any ECOWAS military action against Niger, pursuant to Section 5(4) of the 1999 Constitution requiring National Assembly approval for any deployment of Nigerian armed forces on combat duty outside Nigeria. The Senate's response, communicated through Senate President Godswill Akpabio and the Senate Committee on Defence, was a rejection of the request. The 5 August 2023 Senate position — articulated more in private correspondence and committee meetings than in a formal plenary vote — was driven by three concerns. First, the Northern Senators' Forum, led by Senator Abdul Ningi (Bauchi), argued that a Nigerian military intervention in Niger would be culturally and politically untenable given the deep Hausa-Fulani trans-border ties, the Sokoto-Caliphate historical relationship with Niger's Hausa-Zarma-Tuareg polity, and the religious-traditional authority of the Sultan of Sokoto, who held the position of Sarkin Musulmi with continuing spiritual authority across the border. Second, the Senate's broader concern was that Nigeria's own North-West and North-East security crises (Boko Haram, ISWAP, banditry, the still-unresolved 2023 mass-abduction wave) made the diversion of military resources to a foreign deployment irresponsible. Third, the constitutional question — whether ECOWAS Authority decisions could override the domestic National Assembly authorisation requirement — was contested by senior senators, with several invoking the 2002 Abacha v Fawehinmi precedent on treaty-internal-law relations. Tinubu's request was, in effect, denied; no formal Senate floor vote took place.

5.5 The Northern Establishment and the Sultan's Mediation

Parallel to the Senate pushback, the Northern political and traditional establishment mounted a public and private campaign against the intervention threat. The Northern Governors' Forum, chaired by Gombe Governor Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya, issued a 6 August 2023 statement opposing any military action. The Sultan of Sokoto, Sa'ad Abubakar III — both a former Brigadier General in the Nigerian Army and the spiritual head of approximately 70 million Nigerian Muslims — personally dispatched a delegation to Niamey on 9 August 2023 led by his representative Sheikh Abubakar Bawa Bwari and engaged in direct dialogue with Tchiani. The Sultan's intervention was widely understood as a parallel diplomatic track sanctioned by Tinubu but not formally part of the ECOWAS process. The Bauchi Emir, the Kano Emir (then the recently-restored Muhammadu Sanusi II's predecessor Aminu Ado Bayero), and the Borno establishment all signalled opposition to intervention.

5.6 The 10 August 2023 Second Abuja Summit and the Standby Force Activation Order

The 6 August 2023 ultimatum expired without CNSP compliance. The CNSP responded with defiance — closing Nigerien airspace, announcing the breaking of military-cooperation agreements with France, and aligning publicly with Mali and Burkina Faso. On 10 August 2023, Tinubu convened a second extraordinary ECOWAS summit in Abuja, which ordered the activation of the ECOWAS Standby Force "for deployment to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Niger." The communiqué did not specify a deployment date. Senior ECOWAS military officers — including Nigerian Chief of Defence Staff General Christopher Musa and the Defence Chiefs Committee meeting in Accra on 17–18 August — discussed operational planning, force composition, command arrangements, and the likely route of intervention (from a Nigerian staging base at Katsina or Sokoto). The operational planning, however, never advanced beyond preliminary stages. The Standby Force did not deploy.

5.7 Why the Force Did Not Deploy

Multiple factors converged to prevent the deployment. Operationally, the Standby Force as a concept had never been fully resourced; the Nigerian military's logistics capacity for a multi-state deployment of the necessary scale (estimated by ISS Africa and the Nigerian Tribune at [TBD-VERIFY: a force of 25,000 to 30,000 personnel would have been required for a credible operation, given Niger's 1.2 million square kilometres and the AES solidarity threat]) was unproven, and the Nigerian Air Force's transport assets were stretched. Politically, the Nigerian Senate's pushback, the Northern establishment's objections, the AES Mali-Burkina solidarity declaration (which warned that intervention would be considered an act of war), and Algeria's 18 August 2023 statement opposing military action all narrowed Tinubu's room for manoeuvre. Diplomatically, multiple back-channels became active: Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby flew to Niamey on 27 July (before the formal ECOWAS summit) and met Tchiani; Faure Gnassingbé of Togo sent a delegation; the United States deployed Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to Niamey on 7 August (where her meeting with the CNSP went badly); the African Union Peace and Security Council in its 14 August 2023 meeting declined to endorse a military intervention. By late August 2023, the political momentum had shifted from intervention to negotiation. The 14 December 2023 ECOWAS Abuja summit formally retreated from the military-intervention posture and lifted some economic sanctions on humanitarian grounds, while maintaining political suspension.

6. The 16 September 2023 Charter of Liptako-Gourma and the AES Formation

6.1 The Bamako Signing

On 16 September 2023, with the August 2023 ECOWAS intervention threat having decisively failed, the heads of state of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger gathered in Bamako and signed the Charter of Liptako-Gourma establishing the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES). The Charter took its name from the Liptako-Gourma tri-border region where the territories of the three states meet, an area of approximately 370,000 square kilometres that had been since 2017 the operational heart of the JNIM and ISGS jihadist insurgency. The Charter — published in French as the founding document, with an Arabic version subsequently produced for the Goïta-Tchiani Islamic-discourse purposes — was structurally a mutual-defence pact. Article 6 provided that "any attack on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of one or several parties to the Charter shall be considered as an act of aggression against the other parties and shall trigger the duty of assistance and aid by all parties." Article 7 provided for joint military planning and operations.

6.2 The Doctrinal Framework

The AES Charter and the subsequent declarations of the three heads of state articulated a doctrinal framework that distinguished the alliance from ECOWAS along three dimensions. The first was the rejection of conditionality on civilian governance. Whereas ECOWAS membership entailed the 2001 Democracy Protocol's commitment to constitutional government, the AES Charter contained no such commitment; military government was treated as a legitimate response to the security crisis. The second was the embrace of Russian counter-terrorism partnership. The Charter did not name Russia, but the operational integration of Wagner / Africa Corps personnel across Mali and Burkina (and from late 2023 in Niger) was understood as part of the alliance's security architecture. The third was the sovereigntist economic posture. Subsequent AES declarations indicated intentions to withdraw from the West African CFA franc, to establish an AES investment bank, to issue an AES passport, and to develop AES-internal trade arrangements outside the ECOWAS framework.

6.3 The July 2024 Niamey Confederation Summit

The first AES Heads of State Summit was held in Niamey on 6 July 2024 — pointedly scheduled on the same day as the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government meeting in Abuja. The Niamey summit upgraded the alliance from a mutual-defence pact to a "Confederation of Sahel States" and established a rotating presidency, with Goïta taking the first one-year term. The summit also announced the formation of an AES investment bank (the Banque Confédérale d'Investissement et de Développement de la Confédération AES), an AES stabilisation fund, an AES common-television network (Bara'a), an AES passport (to be issued from 2025), and a planned departure from the CFA franc. The Niamey communiqué framed the AES as "an irreversible choice of the peoples of the Sahel."

6.4 The AES Information Order

A distinctive feature of the AES has been its information architecture. The CNSP and the equivalents in Bamako and Ouagadougou have aggressively curtailed Western media access. RFI (Radio France Internationale) and France 24 were suspended in Mali (April 2022), Burkina Faso (March 2023), and Niger (August 2023). The BBC was suspended in Burkina Faso in April 2024 over coverage of an alleged army massacre in Karma village. Nigerian press access, while not formally suspended, has been heavily restricted. Premium Times, Daily Trust, and Punch correspondents have been intermittently denied accreditation in Niamey. The Wagner-linked African Initiative and a range of Telegram and TikTok channels have become major sources of AES-aligned reporting. This information order has reshaped the empirical foundation of any analytical writing on the post-2023 Sahel — including this document, which records this constraint explicitly.

7. The 28 January 2024 Withdrawal Notice and the December 2024 Abuja Summit

7.1 The Withdrawal Communiqué

On 28 January 2024, the AES heads of state issued a joint communiqué announcing the three states' withdrawal from ECOWAS "without delay." The communiqué cited ECOWAS sanctions as having "inflicted inhuman and irresponsible hardship on the populations" of the three states, accused ECOWAS of having "moved away from the ideals of the founding fathers and pan-Africanism," and asserted that ECOWAS had become "under the influence of foreign powers." The communiqué's "without delay" language was directly contradicted by Article 91 of the 1993 Revised ECOWAS Treaty, which required a one-year written notice during which the seceding state remained bound by treaty obligations.

7.2 The ECOWAS Legal-Procedural Response

The ECOWAS Commission, then under President Omar Touray (Gambian), responded with a 29 January 2024 statement noting receipt of the communiqué and indicating that the Commission would advise the Authority on the procedural questions. The 24 February 2024 ECOWAS extraordinary summit in Abuja partially modified the response: the summit lifted the bulk of the economic sanctions on Niger (border closures, financial-flow restrictions, electricity-supply suspension) on humanitarian and pragmatic grounds, while maintaining the political suspension and the demand for Bazoum's release. The summit also reiterated the Article 91 one-year-notice provision, implicitly accepting that the AES states' departure was effectively occurring while contesting the timeline.

7.3 The Tinubu-Faye Transition and the December 2024 Abuja Summit

The ECOWAS Chair rotation in December 2024 transferred authority from Tinubu to Senegal's Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Faye, inaugurated as Senegalese president on 2 April 2024 on a partly sovereigntist programme that had included campaign-trail criticism of ECOWAS sanctions on the Sahel states, brought a notably different tone to the AES question. The 15 December 2024 ECOWAS Abuja summit, held under Tinubu's outgoing chairship but with Faye's incoming influence visible, accepted what the summit communiqué described as a "six-month transition window" beyond the formal January 2025 effective exit, during which AES-ECOWAS economic, free-movement, and trade arrangements would continue to operate pending the negotiation of permanent residual arrangements. The summit also formally accepted the AES departure as legally effective on 29 January 2025, twelve months after the 28 January 2024 communiqué — adopting the Article 91 timeline that the ECOWAS Commission had asserted from the start.

7.4 The 29 January 2025 Effective Exit

On 29 January 2025, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger formally ceased to be member states of ECOWAS. The ECOWAS Commission, in a brief 29 January statement, "took note" of the departure and committed to working with the three states on residual arrangements during the six-month transition window expiring 29 July 2025. The AES side, in a coordinated 30 January statement from Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey, framed the departure as the beginning of a new pan-African era and announced an accelerated AES institutional programme (the passport launch, the bank establishment, the television network operationalisation).

7.5 The Residual Arrangements Negotiation (2025–2026)

The May 2025 Bamako technical meeting, the August 2025 Ouagadougou follow-up, and the February 2026 Abuja senior-officials meeting have produced a working framework — not yet a formal treaty — under which AES-ECOWAS free movement, customs cooperation, and trade arrangements continue to operate pending the planned July 2026 ECOWAS summit in Dakar. The framework has been politically possible because both sides have an interest in its continuation: the AES states are landlocked and depend on the Lagos-Cotonou-Lomé coastal corridors and the Tema and Abidjan ports for commercial access; ECOWAS coastal states benefit from the AES-internal market for cement, fuel, and consumer goods. The framework has been politically fragile because both sides retain the option of unilateral termination, and because particular flash-points (the AES passport's recognition by ECOWAS border posts; the continuation of ECOWAS Court of Justice jurisdiction over AES-state cases involving human-rights claims by displaced AES nationals; the AES departure from the CFA franc) remain unresolved.

8. Tinubu's Personal Diplomacy and the ECOWAS Chair Tenure (9 July 2023 – 7 December 2024)

8.1 The Lagos-Anchored Posture

Tinubu's seventeen-month ECOWAS chairship was conducted on a distinctive Lagos-anchored model. Unlike previous Nigerian ECOWAS chairs (Obasanjo, Jonathan, Buhari at various points), Tinubu maintained his policy operation primarily from the Bourdillon residence in Ikoyi rather than from Aso Rock Villa in Abuja, with his Special Adviser on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora Matters Yusuf Tuggar (later Foreign Minister), the National Security Adviser Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, and the Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila composing the principal foreign-policy circle. The Lagos-anchored posture had operational consequences: ECOWAS visiting delegations often travelled to Lagos rather than Abuja; key decisions were made in the Bourdillon residence's reception rooms rather than the Aso Rock Council Chamber. ECOWAS Commission President Omar Touray and the technical secretariat in Abuja worked with what at times was perceived as limited visibility into the Chair's deliberative process.

8.2 The Faure Gnassingbé Channel

The most active back-channel of the August 2023 crisis was the Togolese channel under President Faure Gnassingbé. Togo, while a formal ECOWAS member, had a long history of accommodation with both military regimes and irregular transitions (the 2005 succession from Eyadéma père to Eyadéma fils was itself a quasi-coup), and Gnassingbé's foreign-policy posture was uniquely suited to mediation. The Togolese delegation made repeated visits to Niamey through August and September 2023, secured the release of certain detained Bazoum cabinet members, and was widely understood within the ECOWAS Commission as the principal channel through which the August-September de-escalation was achieved.

8.3 The Mahamat Idriss Déby Chadian Channel

The Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby — himself the product of an irregular succession after his father's April 2021 battlefield death — visited Niamey on 27 July 2023, the day after the coup, becoming the first foreign head of state to meet Tchiani. The Chadian intervention was strategically significant: Chad, while not an ECOWAS member, was a Lake Chad Basin and G5 Sahel partner, with a direct security interest in the Niger situation. Déby's posture — neither endorsing the coup nor demanding Bazoum's restoration — provided early signal to the CNSP that not all regional actors would accept the ECOWAS intervention threat.

8.4 The Bassirou Diomaye Faye Senegalese Reset

The March 2024 election of Bassirou Diomaye Faye in Senegal — the first PASTEF (Patriotes Africains du Sénégal pour le Travail, l'Éthique et la Fraternité) candidate to win the presidency, released from detention only days before the election — reshaped the ECOWAS-AES dynamic. Faye's campaign-trail criticism of ECOWAS sanctions on Mali and his sovereigntist economic rhetoric (including a campaign-stage commitment to renegotiate fishing agreements with the EU and to review the CFA franc arrangements) made him a natural interlocutor for the AES states. Faye's June 2024 visit to Niamey and his September 2024 Bamako-Ouagadougou tour signalled a Senegalese readiness to negotiate rather than confront. The December 2024 transfer of the ECOWAS Chair from Tinubu to Faye marked the institutional ratification of this reset.

8.5 The Limits of Lagos-Based Suasion

The post-2024 assessment of Tinubu's ECOWAS chairship is sharply divided. Sympathetic accounts (Tuggar's late-2024 ThisDay interview, the ECOWAS Commission's December 2024 farewell communique) emphasise the seriousness with which Tinubu took the regional mandate, his willingness to bear domestic political costs for ECOWAS positions, and the maintenance of ECOWAS institutional unity through a period of unprecedented stress. Critical accounts (Olusegun Adeniyi's December 2024 ThisDay column, Adekeye Adebajo's Premium Times assessment, Mvemba Phezo Dizolele's Foreign Policy essay) read the chairship as a strategic failure: the August 2023 intervention threat exposed Nigerian regional power as more rhetorical than operational, the AES departure represented a structural diminution of ECOWAS that the chairship did not prevent, and the Bazoum question remained unresolved at the chairship's end. The intermediate, structural account (Carl LeVan's mid-2025 African Affairs essay; Hannah Armstrong's June 2025 ICG analysis) treats both readings as partial: Tinubu inherited a regional order already eroded by Mali and Burkina ruptures and by the 2020s great-power competition; his chairship managed the crisis at considerable personal cost without preventing the outcome that the structural drivers had made probable.

9. The Consequences for Nigeria's Northern Border

9.1 The Sokoto-Kebbi Frontier and the Lakurawa Emergence

The most direct and immediate consequence of the post-2023 Sahel rupture for Nigeria has been the emergence of the Lakurawa group along the Sokoto-Kebbi border with Niger. As detailed in NG-F-01, Lakurawa emerged in late 2023 along the Sokoto State Wurno Local Government Area frontier, initially as a self-described vigilante force welcomed by some border communities against persistent bandit raids. Through 2024 the group progressively imposed Sharia-criminal-code enforcement, levied taxation on local commerce, and engaged in forced recruitment. The November 2024 Wurno-area Mararaba massacre — in which Lakurawa fighters reportedly killed [TBD-VERIFY: between 15 and over 30 civilians, with figures contested between Sokoto State Government and ACLED reporting] — triggered the November 2024 Federal High Court designation of Lakurawa as a terrorist organisation. The operational linkage between Lakurawa and the JNIM-AQIM networks operating from the now-uncooperative Niger and Mali territories is the AES rupture's most direct security cost to Nigeria.

9.2 The MNJTF Degradation

The Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) — established in 2015 with headquarters at N'Djamena, Chad, and contingents from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin — has been the operational backbone of cross-border counter-Boko-Haram and counter-ISWAP cooperation in the Lake Chad Basin theatre. The Niger 2023 coup placed an immediate question mark over the reliability of the Nigerien contingent (Sector 4, headquartered at Diffa). Through late 2023 and into 2024, the Nigerien military's operational integration with MNJTF was progressively reduced; intelligence-sharing was constrained; joint patrols became less frequent. The MNJTF has not been formally dissolved, but its operational effectiveness has been measurably degraded. The G5 Sahel Joint Force, a separate counter-terrorism architecture established in 2017 under French initiative, was formally dissolved on 2 December 2023 after the AES states' withdrawal.

9.3 The Border Closure and the Kano-Maradi Corridor

The August 2023 Nigerian closure of the border with Niger — implemented as part of the ECOWAS sanctions regime under the 30 July 2023 Abuja summit communiqué — produced severe immediate disruption to the Kano-Maradi-Agadez commercial corridor, the principal economic axis between Northern Nigeria and the Sahel. The Maradi market, on the Niger side of the border, is the largest livestock-and-grain market in the Sahel, supplying Nigerian beef, sorghum, millet, and onion needs. The border closure produced grain-price spikes in Kano, Sokoto, and Katsina in August-October 2023 that contributed to the broader food-inflation crisis treated in NG-E-05. Partial reopenings from late 2023 and the formal lifting of border sanctions in February 2024 restored most of the corridor, but the operational unreliability of the cross-border framework has persisted; the trans-frontier traders' confidence has not fully recovered.

9.4 The Transhumance and the Middle-Belt Spillover

Nigerian and Nigerien Fulani transhumance routes — the seasonal cattle movements through which Sahelian pastoralists drive herds southward into the Nigerian Middle Belt in the dry season — have become more militarised since 2023. Banditry along the routes has increased; weapons proliferation along the Niger-Nigeria border has supplied the North-West banditry economy; the security dynamics have implications for the Middle-Belt herder-farmer conflict treated in NG-F-01. The structural connection between Sahel security and Middle-Belt conflict — long noted by ICG, Mercy Corps, and the IFRA-Nigeria network — has become more acute under the post-2023 rupture.

9.5 The Diplomatic Costs

Beyond the operational and economic costs, Nigeria has borne a diplomatic cost. The Bazoum question — the continuing detention of a deposed president, with whom Tinubu had personal relations through the African presidents' network — remains unresolved as of mid-2026 and is a continuing irritant in Nigerian relations with Niamey. The August 2023 intervention threat, even though not executed, has been cited by AES officials as evidence of Nigerian subordination to French and US interests, with knock-on effects on Nigeria's broader African positioning. The cost has been concrete enough that Tinubu's December 2024 Renewed Hope Mid-Term Reset speech included an unusual passage acknowledging the need for Nigerian foreign policy to be "more carefully calibrated to the realities of African sovereignty."

10. Three Contested Accounts

10.1 The ECOWAS-Tinubu Constitutionalist Account

The first account, articulated by the ECOWAS Commission under Touray, by the Tinubu administration through Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar and NSA Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, by Bazoum himself in the limited interviews he has been able to give from detention, and by the broader liberal-democratic constitutionalist tradition in West African political thought (Adekeye Adebajo, Olusegun Adeniyi, Ibrahim Gambari, Jibrin Ibrahim), treats the post-2020 Sahel coups as illegitimate seizures of power by military factions exploiting genuine but containable governance crises. On this account, the 2001 ECOWAS Democracy Protocol is not an external imposition on African sovereignty but the codification of a hard-won African constitutional consensus against the post-independence cycle of military coups. The August 2023 intervention threat was the legitimate enforcement of that consensus. The AES is a regression. The proper African response is to maintain the constitutional standard, to negotiate the restoration of civilian government on agreed timetables, and to refuse legitimation of the juntas. The account's strongest argument is the documented record of AES governance: arbitrary detention of political opponents, suppression of press freedom, civilian-casualty incidents in Africa-Corps-assisted counter-insurgency operations (the March 2022 Moura massacre in Mali, the April 2024 Karma massacre in Burkina Faso), and the deferral of promised transitions. The account's weakest point is its failure to engage with the structural drivers of the coups and with the genuine popular support that the juntas — particularly Traoré — have enjoyed.

10.2 The AES Sovereigntist-Anti-Imperial Account

The second account, articulated through CNSP communiqués, the speeches of Goïta and Tchiani, Traoré's pan-Africanist rhetoric, the writings of Malian, Burkinabé, and Nigerien intellectuals sympathetic to the juntas (Issa N'Diaye, Aminata Dramane Traoré, Olivier Vallée, Boubacar Boris Diop, Aïssata Tall Sall), and a broader African-diaspora discourse on Telegram, TikTok, and YouTube, treats the post-2020 coups as legitimate popular interventions against corrupt, foreign-dependent civilian regimes that had failed to defend their populations against jihadist violence. On this account, the 2001 ECOWAS Democracy Protocol is a constitutional fiction that protects elite arrangements between African civilian rulers and Western powers; the August 2023 intervention threat was a French- and US-orchestrated effort to recolonise the Sahel through Nigerian proxies; the AES is the long-overdue assertion of African sovereignty. The account's strongest argument is the documented failure of the pre-coup civilian regimes to halt jihadist territorial expansion (Mali had lost effective control over more than half its national territory by 2020; Burkina by 2022) and the genuine popular mobilisation in support of the juntas (the August 2023 pro-CNSP rallies in Niamey; the recurring pan-African solidarity demonstrations across Francophone Africa). The account's weakest point is its strategic accommodation of the Wagner / Africa Corps relationship — which trades French security tutelage for Russian security tutelage without resolving the underlying dependence — and its silence on documented junta-era human-rights abuses.

10.3 The Structural Sahel-Climate-Conflict Reading

The third account, articulated by ICG (notably Hannah Armstrong, Rinaldo Depagne, and the late Jean-Hervé Jezequel), ACLED, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and academic specialists (Yvan Guichaoua, Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, Vincent Foucher, Boubacar Haidara, Andrew Lebovich), treats the post-2020 coup belt as the political symptom of a longer Sahel crisis whose structural drivers preceded both the civilian regimes and the juntas. The crisis is, on this account, driven by climate-displacement pressures on the agro-pastoral economy of the Sahel; by the post-2011 weapons-and-insurgent-flow consequences of the Libya intervention; by the 2012 Tuareg-MNLA / Ansar Dine rebellion in northern Mali and its progressive jihadist transformation; by the documented operational failures of both French Operation Barkhane and the post-Barkhane regional architectures; and by deep-rooted structural weakness in Sahelian state capacity, particularly in rural-frontier governance. On this account, neither the ECOWAS-constitutionalist nor the AES-sovereigntist position addresses the structural drivers; both are political-elite contestations operating at the surface of a much deeper crisis. The reading is analytically powerful precisely because it does not adjudicate the political-judgment questions — it instead reframes them. Its weakness is its corresponding inability to recommend policy: if the drivers are structural and long-term, what should be done now?

10.4 Why Three Accounts Rather Than Adjudication

The corpus's three-account discipline holds particularly tightly in this document because the question of which account is correct is the question being contested in real time across the West African political space. The Nigerian Senate's August 2023 pushback can be read as a constitutionalist defection (Northern legislators' particular constitutional reading), as a sovereigntist alignment (rejection of regional military adventure), or as a structural realism (recognition of operational over-stretch). The Sultan of Sokoto's August 2023 mediation can be read as a constitutionalist preference for negotiated restoration, as a sovereigntist alignment with the trans-Saharan Muslim community, or as a structural reading of the limits of force. The corpus's job is not to decide which is correct but to record the contestation in terms that allow future historians — and current readers — to test each account against the evidence as it accumulates.

11. Forward View — 2026–2028 Trajectory and the Spiral Index

11.1 The Residual Arrangements through July 2026

The most immediate forward question is the July 2026 ECOWAS Dakar summit, at which the residual AES-ECOWAS arrangements are expected to be settled in a more durable form. The current working framework — provisional recognition of the AES passport at ECOWAS borders, continuation of free movement of persons under residual arrangements, customs cooperation for AES-internal transit, and the ECOWAS Court of Justice's continued jurisdiction over pre-departure matters — is sustainable in the short term but politically fragile. The Dakar summit could move toward a formal AES-ECOWAS associate-member or observer-status framework (the Mauritania post-2000 precedent), toward a partial-reintegration framework (a pre-condition-free path back for any AES state choosing to return), or toward a definitive rupture (formal termination of all transitional arrangements). The most likely outcome, based on the May 2026 Abuja technical-officials meeting, is the first: a structured arms-length relationship that preserves economic ties while accepting political separation.

11.2 The CFA Franc Question

The AES announcement of intentions to withdraw from the West African CFA franc — first articulated in the July 2024 Niamey summit communiqué and reiterated in subsequent declarations — remains as of mid-2026 unimplemented. The technical and political difficulties of constructing a credible AES alternative currency are substantial: the CFA franc's euro peg has provided macroeconomic stability that AES states would struggle to replicate; the BCEAO (Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest) reserve-pooling arrangement has provided foreign-exchange resilience that AES states' individual reserves could not match; the French Treasury's operational role, while politically toxic, has been technically functional. AES officials have hinted at a Russian or Chinese reserve-backing arrangement for an alternative currency, but no formal agreement has been announced. The CFA question is the most concrete economic test of AES sustainability; its resolution, in either direction, will reshape the West African financial architecture.

11.3 The Bazoum Question

President Bazoum remains under detention in Niamey as of mid-2026, with intermittent reports of judicial proceedings against him for high treason. The June 2024 attempt by the Tchiani regime to lift his presidential immunity for purposes of prosecution was contested by Bazoum's legal team and by international human-rights observers. The continuing detention has been a sustained irritant in CNSP relations with the broader international community: the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights issued a March 2024 provisional-measures order calling for his release; ECOWAS Court of Justice issued a December 2023 order; the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has classified the detention as arbitrary. The Bazoum question's resolution — whether through eventual release, formal prosecution and conviction, or continued indefinite detention — will be a continuing measure of the AES-ECOWAS relationship and of the broader international community's posture toward the post-coup Sahel.

11.4 The 2027 Nigerian Election Cycle

Nigeria's 2027 election cycle — primaries in 2026, general election in February 2027 — will be conducted against the backdrop of the post-AES regional order. The Tinubu administration's Sahel policy will be a campaign-issue subject of contestation, particularly in the North-West and North-East where the rupture's consequences are most acute. The opposition coalition forming around Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and a possible Kwankwaso bloc has signalled criticism of the August 2023 intervention threat and the broader Sahel posture; the APC's defence of Tinubu's chairship has been more muted than vigorous. The 2027 election will be one of the first national elections in West Africa conducted with the AES rupture as an established political-economy condition rather than a developing crisis.

11.5 The JNIM-AQIM-ISGS Trajectory

The continuing trajectory of jihadist insurgency within the AES space will materially shape Nigerian security. The Wagner / Africa Corps-assisted counter-insurgency in Mali and Burkina has produced controversial civilian-casualty incidents (the March 2022 Moura massacre, the April 2024 Karma village massacre, multiple drone-strike incidents documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) without producing demonstrable territorial recovery against JNIM. JNIM's geographical footprint has, by ACLED's 2025 reporting, expanded southward into the Gulf of Guinea littoral (northern Côte d'Ivoire, northern Togo, northern Benin, northern Ghana). The Lakurawa-JNIM connection in northern Nigeria is the eastward extension of this expansion. The forward trajectory through 2027-2028 will depend heavily on whether the post-2024 ISGS-JNIM rivalry (which has produced internal jihadist conflict reducing pressure on state forces) intensifies or resolves, and on whether the AES counter-insurgency posture produces qualitatively different outcomes than the pre-2020 French-assisted posture did.

11.6 The Spiral Index

This document forms part of a larger NG-F (foreign policy and security architecture) cluster and connects laterally to NG-D (Buhari era), NG-E (Tinubu era), NG-G (Niger Delta), NG-H-PRES-04 and NG-H-PRES-05 (Buhari and Tinubu biographies), NG-J (contested-account dossiers), and NG-R-01 (governance books canon). Forward expansion of the cluster is expected to include: NG-F-04 (a dedicated treatment of Nigeria's relations with the African Union and its position within the AU Peace and Security Council), NG-F-05 (Nigeria-China and Nigeria-Russia bilateral relations, including the specific role of Russian Africa Corps operations along Nigeria's frontier), and a possible NG-F-06 treatment of the Lake Chad Basin Commission's evolution under the post-AES security order. Cross-corpus connections — particularly to comparable analyses in IN, RU, UA, USA, and prospectively SG — will become more important as the comparative-governance dimension of the corpus matures.

The reform-durability question that pervades the Tinubu first term applies here with particular force. The Sahel policy is one of the few foreign-policy domains in which the Tinubu administration has been compelled to make highly visible decisions with measurable consequences. The August 2023 intervention threat's non-execution, the subsequent acceptance of AES departure, the December 2024 acceptance of the six-month transition window, and the 2026 residual-arrangements negotiation form a sequence in which Nigerian regional power has been visibly recalibrated. Whether the recalibration represents a sober adjustment to changed regional realities — the structural reading — or a strategic retreat that has diminished Nigeria's regional standing — the critical reading — or a sustained constitutionalist holding-action against forces that may eventually reverse — the sympathetic reading — will be one of the central political-economy questions of Nigerian foreign policy through the 2027 election cycle and into the post-Tinubu period.

Sources

ECOWAS Primary Sources:

ECOWAS, "Final Communiqué of the Extraordinary Summit of the Authority of Heads of State and Government on the Political Situation in Niger," Abuja, 30 July 2023.
ECOWAS, "Final Communiqué of the Second Extraordinary Summit of the Authority of Heads of State and Government on the Political Situation in Niger," Abuja, 10 August 2023.
ECOWAS, "Final Communiqué of the Extraordinary Summit on the Political Situation in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea," Abuja, 14 December 2023.
ECOWAS, "Final Communiqué of the 64th Ordinary Session of the Authority of Heads of State and Government," Abuja, 15 December 2024.
ECOWAS Treaty of Lagos (28 May 1975) and Revised Treaty (24 July 1993, Cotonou), Article 91 on withdrawal.
ECOWAS Protocol Relating to the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security (Lomé, 10 December 1999).
ECOWAS Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance (Dakar, 21 December 2001).

AES / CNSP Primary Sources: 8. Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (Niger), Communiqués 1 through 47 (26 July 2023 – June 2024), as broadcast on RTN and reproduced in L'Événement Niger and Sahel Tribune. 9. Charter of Liptako-Gourma establishing the Alliance des États du Sahel, signed Bamako, 16 September 2023. 10. AES Heads of State Summit Communiqué, Niamey, 6 July 2024 (establishing the Confederation of Sahel States). 11. AES Joint Communiqué on withdrawal from ECOWAS, 28 January 2024.

Nigerian Government and Legislature: 12. Nigerian Senate, correspondence and committee records relating to the request for authorisation of military intervention in Niger, August 2023 (partially reproduced in Premium Times and Daily Trust reporting). 13. Nigerian Federal High Court, designation of Lakurawa as a terrorist organisation, FHC/ABJ/CS/1259/2024, November 2024. 14. Office of the National Security Adviser (Mallam Nuhu Ribadu), statements on the Sahel security architecture, 2023–2025. 15. Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ambassador Yusuf Tuggar), policy statements and ThisDay interviews, 2023–2025.

Niger / Mali / Burkina Press: 16. L'Événement (Niger), comprehensive reporting on the July 2023 coup and CNSP trajectory. 17. Le Pays and L'Observateur Paalga (Burkina Faso), reporting on the January 2022 and September 2022 coups. 18. L'Indépendant and Le Procès Verbal (Mali), reporting on the 2020 and 2021 coups.

Nigerian Press: 19. Premium Times — Niger crisis coverage by Musikilu Mojeed, Ben Ezeamalu, Idris Ibrahim, August 2023 through 2026. 20. Daily Trust — Northern political establishment coverage by Mannir Dan-Ali and colleagues, 2023–2026. 21. Punch — ECOWAS coverage by Sunday Aborisade, 2023–2025. 22. ThisDay — Olusegun Adeniyi columns and editorial line, 2023–2026. 23. The Guardian (Nigeria) — Editorial line and foreign-affairs commentary, 2023–2026. 24. Africa Confidential — Sahel and West Africa intelligence reporting, 2020–2026 (paywalled subscription archive). 25. Reuters (Africa desk) — Aaron Ross, Boureima Balima, David Lewis reporting, 2020–2026. 26. Bloomberg (West Africa) — Ruth Olurounbi and colleagues, 2023–2026.

International Crisis Group and Think-Tank Sources: 27. International Crisis Group, "After Niger's Coup: The West African Crisis Spreads" (Africa Report N°313, 22 August 2023). 28. International Crisis Group, "Containing Militancy in West Africa's Park W" (Africa Report N°310, 7 August 2023). 29. International Crisis Group, "Sahel: ECOWAS-AES — Towards a New West African Order?" (Africa Briefing N°196, March 2025). 30. Institute for Security Studies (ISS Africa, Pretoria), policy briefs by Liesl Louw-Vaudran, David Zounmenou, Paul-Simon Handy, 2020–2026. 31. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Sahel Yearbooks and ad-hoc reports, 2020–2026. 32. United States Institute of Peace, Sahel programme analyses, 2020–2026.

US and European Government Sources: 33. US Department of State, daily press briefings and statements on Niger, August 2023 – September 2024 (covering the formal coup designation in September 2023 and the May 2024 termination notice). 34. US Africa Command (AFRICOM), public statements on the Niger Air Base 201 withdrawal, 2024. 35. French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence, statements on the Mali, Burkina, and Niger withdrawals, 2022–2024. 36. European External Action Service, statements on the EU Military Partnership Mission Niger and related operations, 2022–2025.

Academic and Book-Length Sources: 37. Adekeye Adebajo, Building Peace in West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau (Lynne Rienner, 2002) — foundational text on ECOMOG. 38. Carl LeVan, Contemporary Nigerian Politics: Competition in a Time of Transition and Terror (Cambridge, 2019) — frames the Nigerian foreign-policy posture. 39. Yvan Guichaoua and others, Mali: A State Failure? (Hurst, 2024) — collected essays on the Malian trajectory. 40. Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, L'Afrique, nouvelle frontière du djihad? (La Découverte, 2018) — structural reading of Sahel jihadism. 41. Hannah Armstrong, ICG essays and academic articles, 2020–2026. 42. Issa N'Diaye, Silence, on démocratise! Pour une lecture critique des expériences démocratiques en Afrique (Tarik, multiple editions) — AES-sympathetic Malian intellectual tradition. 43. Olivier Vallée, Pouvoirs et politiques en Afrique (Desclée de Brouwer, 1999, updated essays) — broader Francophone-Africa political-economy. 44. Vincent Foucher, "The Sahel Coup Belt and the Limits of External Intervention," Journal of Modern African Studies (forthcoming 2026). 45. Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, Foreign Policy and Africa Report essays on the AES-ECOWAS question, 2024–2026.

Other: 46. ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), Sahel and West Africa dashboards, 2020–2026. 47. HumAngle Media (Nigeria), reporting by Ahmad Salkida and colleagues on the Lakurawa emergence and the Sahel-Nigeria security nexus, 2023–2026.

Related Documents:

NG-A-03: Military Regimes (1966–1999) — context for Nigerian regional security tradition.
NG-B-01: Obasanjo Presidency — ECOMOG-era diplomacy and the post-1999 foreign-policy reset.
NG-C-01: Yar'Adua and Jonathan Era — 2010–11 Côte d'Ivoire crisis and the 2012 northern-Mali origin of the Sahel crisis.
NG-D-01: Buhari Presidency — the 2017 Gambia intervention and the Sahel-region trajectory.
NG-D-02: Chibok Kidnapping and Boko Haram (2014–2024) — overlap with the cross-border insurgent ecosystem.
NG-E-01: Tinubu Presidency — Renewed Hope agenda and foreign-policy framework.
NG-E-04: #EndBadGovernance Protests (August 2024) — domestic cost-of-living crisis intersecting with the Sahel policy.
NG-E-05: Tinubu Economic Governance Trajectory (2024–2025) — macroeconomic context for the Sahel diplomatic costs.
NG-E-06: 2025 Tax Reform Implementation and Naira Stabilisation — fiscal context.
NG-E-07: Tinubu Year Three (2025–2026) — Renewed Hope mid-term reset and the recalibrated foreign-policy posture.
NG-F-01: Security Architecture — Boko Haram, ISWAP, Banditry, and Lakurawa (2009–2025) — direct overlap on the Lakurawa emergence and the cross-border security spillover.
NG-F-02: Nigerian Oil Sector — PIA 2021, NNPC Limited, and Dangote Refinery — economic-foundation context.
NG-H-PRES-01: Olusegun Obasanjo Biography — ECOWAS-era leadership precedent.
NG-H-PRES-04: Muhammadu Buhari Biography — 2017 Gambia intervention and the pre-2023 Sahel posture.
NG-H-PRES-05: Bola Tinubu Biography — life-arc context for the ECOWAS chairship.
NG-J-01: 2023 Election — Three Accounts — contested-account precedent.
NG-J-02: Lekki Toll-Gate Three Accounts — contested-account precedent.
NG-R-01: Nigeria Governance Books Canon — the bibliographic foundation.
NG-A-02: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
NG-F-04: Nigeria-China Relations — Infrastructure, Loans, and the Asymmetric Embrace
NG-K-02: The 2015 Jonathan Concession Decision
NG-N-01: Nigeria in International Perceptions — Giant of Africa, Perpetual Potential, and the Country the Single Story Cannot Hold
NG-D-07: The 2027 Nigerian Election Trajectory and Coalition Politics — APC Re-Nomination, PDP Rebuilding, Labour Party Positioning, the ADC Vehicle, NNPP-Kwankwaso, and the Rotation Debate
NG-D-06: Tinubu Year Three — Fiscal Trajectory, 2026 Tax-Reform Continuation, and Pre-2027 Politics Forward Stubs:
NG-F-04: Nigeria-African Union Relations and the AU-PSC Trajectory (proposed).
NG-F-05: Nigeria-Russia Bilateral Relations and the Africa Corps Question (proposed).
NG-F-06: Lake Chad Basin Commission Under the Post-AES Order (proposed).
NG-G-02: North-West Banditry — A Dedicated Treatment (proposed expansion).