ECOWAS At Freetown: A Regional Body Lacking An Integrated Analytical Picture Of A Complex Problem (1)

The 96th Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Council of Ministers convened at Freetown, West Africa, in 2023. The session's agenda comprised twenty-eight items, with thirteen focusing on institutional administration, six on economic integration, four on governance and legal matters, two on digital and ICT affairs, and a single item addressing the AES negotiation.

Notably, no agenda item concerned a structured analytical assessment of the terrorism and violent extremism threat environment in the region. This lack of security threat assessment is a structural diagnostic of ECOWAS' configuration, as it does not place security priorities on its agenda during a period when the region and the Sahel are experiencing heightened terrorist activities, with four member states effectively partitioned by armed non-state actors.

ECOWAS' absence of a national and regional analytical intelligence function results in the inability to assess security threats, thus directing work at the wrong problems. In contrast, a serious intelligence assessment would include specific forward-looking projections, causal chains, geographic specificity, and decision points with designated response instruments.

ECOWAS' Agropastoral Outlook and Food and Nutrition Situation in the Sahel and West Africa item (19) exemplifies an analytically revealing moment, as it contained all components of a serious intelligence assessment, leading to the mobilization of the Regional Food Security Reserve and Humanitarian Emergency Fund. However, no similar analytical body exists for the security threat environment, highlighting the significant deficit in ECOWAS' analytical capabilities.