Domingos Simões Pereira spent less than six months out of detention before he was arrested again. Guinea-Bissau’s junta released the opposition leader in February, in what looked at the time like a concession won by ECOWAS’ diplomatic pressure. On 10 July, he was sent back to a Bissau cell by a military court, this time he was accused of financing an attempted coup in October. The reversal stands out because it has become a pattern: ECOWAS secures a promise, the promise only lasts as long as attention is focused on the country, and the junta quietly reverses its decision. On 24 July, following intense diplomatic pressure from ECOWAS and a court order, Pereira was again released from prison, with a 90-day medical leave, and travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, for treatment. Pereira, who served as Prime Minister of Guinea-Bissau from 2014 to August 2015, is not being punished for staging a coup, but for remaining the most credible opposition that could have challenged the junta at the ballot in Guinea’s December 2026 elections. He publicly declared that he “absolutely” intends to return to Guinea-Bissau to continue his political work as soon as his health permits.
He is not alone in this. In July 2025, Beninese journalist Comlan Hugues Sossoukpè was detained in Ivory Coast, where he had travelled at the invitation of the government’s digital transition ministry, and extradited to Benin despite holding refugee status in Togo since 2021. The authorities accused him of running an online outlet banned months earlier for what they deemed subversive reporting. Rights groups called it a cross-border operation to silence a critic who thought he had put a border between himself and his government. Together, the cases of Pereira and Sossoukpè describe the same phenomenon from two angles: opposition figures are no longer safe inside their countries, and increasingly, not safe outside them either. Exile has stopped functioning as protection. This is what West Africa’s political reality looks like today: not dramatic coups, but the gradual criminalisation of dissent. Governments invoking alleged coup plots and terrorism to justify crackdowns that regional and international pressure has repeatedly failed to reverse.
Guinea-Bissau is a useful place to start because its relationship with ECOWAS has always been one-sided. Since independence, the country has experienced five coups and several attempts, making it heavily reliant on regional support rather than a state with much to contribute in return. When the army removed President Umaro Sissoco Embaló last November, days after a disputed election, ECOWAS convened an emergency virtual summit within twenty-four hours. Despite this fast response, nothing that mattered changed: the junta still set up a one-year transitional government under General Horta N’Tam, barred Pereira from the presidential race scheduled for December, and still felt free, eight months later, to renege on the release it had granted under that pressure. The speed of ECOWAS’ response and the total absence of its effect are, together, the real story.
It would be wrong to say ECOWAS has totally lost its influence. When soldiers tried to seize Benin’s state broadcaster in December and briefly declared they had deposed President Patrice Talon, Nigeria responded within hours by sending fighter jets, ground troops, and support for loyalist forces that put the coup down before it could consolidate. That is nothing; however, the reason it worked is clear: Benin shares a border with Nigeria, its stability directly affects Nigeria, and Tinubu had every reason to act as fast as he did. It was a case of direct national interest wearing the uniform of regional solidarity, not evidence that ECOWAS itself has recovered any institutional teeth.
The clearest sign that ECOWAS has lost its power is that some states no longer bother pretending to revere it . Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger—three of ECOWAS’s fifteen founding members—announced their joint withdrawal in January 2024 and made it formal a year later, shrinking the bloc from fifteen countries to twelve. Their grievance was specific: ECOWAS’ sanctions on Niger after its 2023 coup were the harshest ever, including border closures, freezing Niger’s assets, stopping financial transactions, and cutting over 70% of the country’s electricity supply, most of which is Nigerian-generated.
The junta called these measures inhumane and accused ECOWAS of serving Western interests rather than the pan-Africanist founding vision it claims. They were right that the sanctions hurt ordinary citizens more efficiently than the regimes; this has been a major flaw of ECOWAS’ coup-response playbook for a decade. The three countries have since formed their own Alliance of Sahel States, launched their own passports, cut military ties with France and Washington, and turned to Russia for security partnerships. ECOWAS reversed the Niger sanctions last year in a bid to restart talks, but the new alliance rejected the offer. A bloc that built its authority on the threat of isolation has discovered that the threat, once carried out and then withdrawn without results, loses its power to scare anyone the next time.
The damage from these withdrawals has spread beyond the Sahel. West Africa’s security crises, once distinguishable by country, are increasingly one continuous corridor running from the desert interior to the coast. In Mali, armed groups linked to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimi (JNIM) and Islamic State affiliates now control large areas, collecting taxes and regulating movement across whole swathes of territory the state no longer administers, even as Russian-linked partnerships prioritise regime protection over reclaiming territory. In Burkina Faso, the junta has dissolved political parties and jailed a prominent imam simply for opposing religious-freedom legislation, but has lost more territory to insurgents who dictate access to land and aid corridors, all while military rule has failed to translate into any actual military advantage.
Niger, now cut off from ECOWAS’ intelligence-sharing architecture, faces sustained pressure in its western Tillabéri region with fewer allies and less room to manoeuvre than it had as a member state. And the insecurity is spreading south: Togo’s northern Savanes region and Benin’s border with Burkina Faso have both seen raids and ambushes that used to be purely Sahelian problems. Côte d’Ivoire, still institutionally stronger than its neighbours, has started to reinforce its own northern frontier and is quietly planning for refugee inflows should Mali’s conflict intensify. None of this is hypothetical anymore. It is a single security crisis affecting many countries.
If ECOWAS has lost so much relevance or declined so much in the past decade, why has this happened? The honest answer is that ECOWAS was never really its own source of authority. It was Nigeria’s proxy for regional leadership, and as Nigeria has weakened, so has ECOWAS. Nigeria founded the bloc in 1975, hosts its headquarters in Abuja, and has historically been its financier and its army. Nigeria led peacekeeping interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone and was behind the removal of The Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh in 2017. What has changed is not ECOWAS’ rules, but Nigeria’s capacity to stand behind it. Domestic economic strain, an internal insurgency, and a foreign policy that critics increasingly describe as reactive rather than proactive have left Nigeria unable to use its past influence today. What erodes the head erodes the body it is attached to; a bloc built around one strong country cannot stay strong if that country loses its strength.
Nigeria’s response to the recent coup has made this inconsistency clear. President Tinubu’s swift military intervention in Benin, compared with his considerably more hesitant posture toward the 2023 coup that installed General Tchiani to power in Niger, has been read by observers as a function of internal Nigerian politics rather than regional principle. The Southwest’s political and historical ties to Benin made it easier to intervene there, while Northern Nigeria’s strong relationship with Niger made the same kind of intervention there a domestic liability. A foreign policy that bends according to which region of Nigeria’s own electorate is watching cannot provide stable leadership for a group of fifteen countries
Niger is the case that shows what happens when Nigerian leverage stops converting into influence. Niger is landlocked and has long depended on Nigeria for fuel and electricity, and by any conventional reading of interdependence should have been the easiest state for Abuja to pressure. Mohamed Bazoum, the president removed by the 2023 coup, has now spent three years under house arrest; the junta ignored Nigeria’s own request to free him and let him leave for a third country, which was a very modest demand. Tchiani was sworn in under a new five-year charter the Nigerien public never voted on. If 70% of a landlocked country’s electricity being switched off by its largest neighbour cannot produce a democratic transition, it is worth asking what economic leverage in West Africa is actually still capable of achieving—and so far, the answer seems to be very little.
The repression accompanying all of this has a consistent character across the juntas, which is itself worth naming as a regional trend rather than three national stories. Mali banned the pan-African magazine Jeune Afrique outright, after it reported on the country’s fuel crisis and on military abuses against Fulani communities. Niger suspended nine international outlets, including AFP and RFI, over vaguely defined “public order” concerns. Burkina Faso’s junta has jailed clerics for opposing legislation and openly disparaged the idea of returning to civilian rule at all, despite promising exactly that when it seized power. None of this reads as three governments improvising separately. It reads as a shared playbook: control information, extend mandates under new charters the public didn’t approve, and treat any remaining opposition, whether a politician, a journalist, or an imam, as a security threat rather than a citizen.
Changes in ECOWAS leadership have not stopped these problems. Tinubu’s two-year term ended with an anti-coup posture that produced real rhetoric and one real intervention, but also an abandoned threat of military action against Niger and a farewell summit the AES states didn’t bother attending. Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio inherited the same standoff and made no more progress reopening it. This July, Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye took the chair at age forty-six, making him one of the youngest heads of state ever to hold the position. Senegal has kept its constitutional order intact through the entire regional turbulence of the last decade, and for the first time, a Senegalese now leads the ECOWAS Commission.
Faye has suggested reviving a long-stalled joint counterterrorism force and has made conciliatory overtures toward Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey. He is different from his two predecessors —a leader without Nigeria’s baggage and untethered from the establishment politics the juntas have used to justify their own takeovers. But he inherits an organisation whose core functions are simultaneously strained: a stalled single currency, trade routes disrupted by the AES’s departure, and a trust deficit built over years of juntas accusing the bloc of enforcing rules only when it suits the powerful. Whether his year produces even one breakaway state re-engaging with ECOWAS institutions, rather than another round of unmet ultimatums, will say more about the bloc’s future than anything said in Freetown at his inauguration.
All of this does not mean West African democracy has completely collapsed, but it has not fully survived either. It looks more like it is settling into a situation where elections are still held in some states while others are ruled by entrenched juntas rewriting their own mandates. ECOWAS continues to issue statements and hold summits without the capacity to enforce meaningful change. That may be the most dangerous outcome of all: a regional bloc still trying to project authority it no longer possesses. The bluff has become part of the status quo, allowing governments to ignore its warnings while preserving the illusion that an effective democratic watchdog remains in place.
But this is not a real solution. A West Africa that wants a genuinely full-strength ECOWAS—one that can make sanctions bite the regime rather than the population, and make a released prisoner stay released— will not get there through another summit or another chairman’s rhetoric alone. It depends on Nigeria rebuilding its own economic and security footing, because a hollowed-out centre cannot project outward, however many jets it can occasionally spare for its own backyard. Until then, the region should expect more Pereiras.
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