This week, I am in Niamey, Niger Republic engaged in an initiative to create a pathway that could free the Sahel from the existential crisis it faces. In September, a high level panel was inaugurated with an open mandate to galvanise African intellectual and political power in seeking solutions to the insecurity raging in the sub-region and placing development back on the agenda. The Panel is led by the former President of Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, who is working with four other members from the continent. The Panel is supported by the United Nations, the African Union and G5-Sahel and has been empowered to recruit African experts knowledgeable about the situation to help with the work.
The crisis in the Sahel is unprecedented and multidimensional. Essentially, most of the states have lost their capacity to govern and assert their authority. The social contract and trust between the state and citizens is broken. Violent extremist operations are widespread, separatist movements have emerged, transnational criminal gangs are in operation and massive quantities of arms are circulating in the hands of non-state actors. Some regimes in the Sahel have fallen following a number of coups d’état. France, which has played a major role in the zone for a long time, is today a contested partner in many of the countries and geo-political dimensions of the current crisis between the West and Russia over the Ukraine war and has become a factor in the Sahel crisis. Maybe precisely because of the depth of the crisis, this is an opportunity to develop a feasible pathway that could provide a solution.
Borders are in question in the Sahel and the 3-frontier zone between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso is indicative of the depth of the crisis where boundaries and the authority of States are disregarded by the agency of non-State actors. The same is true of the borders between Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Another border zone with the same sort of crisis is the Guidimaka zone of the Western Sahel between Mali, Senegal and Mauritania. Finally, the Lake Chad zone with Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad is equally challenged since Boko Haram became a menace way back in 2009.
The Panel is charged with carrying out a strategic diagnosis of the difficult equation between security, governance and development. Security must be improved if development is to return to the agenda. The results of the work are being designed to help re-engineer regional cooperation, which today has disappeared altogether. The international community is engaged on other fronts and maybe that is an opportunity for Sahelians, and indeed Africans to realise they have to save themselves or lose their countries to a Hobbesian state of nature.
The challenge for the Panel is that much of the crisis in the Sahel is deep and long standing. Since the draught of 1973, the climate change crisis, environmental degradation and the southward march of the Sahara have been hitting the zone in a cyclical manner alternating draught and floods, epidemics and locust invasions creating food insecurity. In addition, the zone has about the highest population growth rate in the contemporary world. The result is a huge youth bulge where again the Sahel has been the worst performer in providing education, training and jobs to this young population.
The economy of the zone is largely informal further adding to the high level of the precariousness of livelihoods with a large percentage of the population subsisting on their daily hustle. This produces a huge precariat of actors with agency, especially as so many today have access to sophisticated arms. Some of them are also armed with militant religious ideologies that push them to use their arms with total disregard for the rights, lives and livelihoods of the people.
The context is one of a rapid decline of both social cohesion and national cohesion partly under the push of fake news and dangerous speech in the social media. When you add the rapid growth in the circulation of small arms and light weapons challenging the state’s monopoly of the legitimate monopoly of the means of violence, the consequence is the spread of violent extremism, banditry, terrorism, kidnapping for ransom, separatism and generalised instability. In other words, it is the survival of the strongest.
These processes have weakened state capacity, authority and legitimacy, especially with the collapse of the rule of law and justice that works for the people. At the political level, democratic regression continues leading to tenure elongation by some regimes and the significant return of coup d’état. The generalisation and intensification of violence and instability have led to concerns and a major debate questioning the sincerity of traditional external partners fuelling a drive to play the geo-political card and establish new partnerships in a proto cold war context.
It is the almost complete collapse of the social contract and public trust between state and citizens that has created the existential threat for the Sahelian States. The task of the Panel is, therefore, that of formulating a feasible strategy for rebuilding trust and the social contract between states and citizens to return the state to a process of re-learning how to acquire the capacity for providing public goods in an effective manner and based on the principle of inclusiveness.
The High-level Panel is determined and has the capacity to carry out this task. I am impressed with the quality and knowledge of the African experts and resource persons they have brought together to help them succeed in carrying out their mission. They are ready to seek durable solutions to the crisis in the Sahel by listening attentively to the people who would be asked to make their propositions on their concerns and demands. Marginalised groups including youth and women, community and religious leaders, civil society and the media, political parties and trade unions and the large intellectual community in the zone would all have an opportunity to express themselves.
The social media is playing a major role both as a means of expression of the people and also as a means of changing political opinions in the Sahel. It contains true opinions expressed by the people but also fake news and hate speech that are deepening problems related to social and national inclusion. WhatsApp in particular has become a major opinion moulder and different forces are using it to advance agendas that are not necessarily in tune with reality and/or the interest of the Sahel. Understanding its dynamics, utility and dangers is part of the task the Panel would have to confront.
