Letter to The Sahel

Dear Transition Presidents Goita, Tchani, and Traore,

I am informed of your collective decision to withdraw from the Economic Community of West African States that your great peoples and governments helped form and forge over the years. The journey has been long, arduous, and riddled with challenges, but it was a necessary undertaking given yours and your partners' political and economic situations of the times. I understand President Goita has decided to remain in the UEMOA.

I also understand the current ambiance among your great peoples and nations, transitioning between military and civilian government, and amid challenges of insurgencies and banditry of all manner. There is also the matter of food production and much reduced rainfall. Perhaps your decision was forced, coming on the heels of ECOWAS sanctions against your governments variously, and while I applaud your courage and dispatch, I encourage your more measured deliberations to remake a greater whole. Your great peoples and nations have several attributes in common, not the least of which are shared borders, common ethno-linguistico-industrial traditions, and a Lingua Franca in French, and they should stand you in good stead in Ecowexit for your greater growth and development.

In the main, I recognize and applaud your uncommon courage, and I share sympathy with some of your calculus, namely,

• the common ID/passport/insurance regime of Ecowas facilitates contraband, drug, and human trafficking, and is not useful in the promotion of free trade or of free movement of goods and services.
• Visa-free travel gives aid and comfort to illegal migration and the proliferation of arms and banditry in the subregion.
• the cookie-cutter vision of development truncates the growth of unique peoples and nations, and further alienates the great peoples from fuller participation in the ware of their lives, and therefore from more responsive governance.

The shortcoming however highlight the challenge in indiscernible peril. Rather than merely displace terrorists and criminals to diffuse and more remote loci, it would be much to your advantage to remain in a seamless security, commerce, and legislative architecture with your Ecowas neighbors in order to facilitate information-sharing and expeditionary deployment in those realms.

May I take this opportunity of an unsolicited letter to plead with President Tchiani to release former President Bazoum, his family, and other detained government officials as soon as is logistically possible, and without prejudice.

Further, I encourage you to consider that your great peoples will have opportunity to elect future governments and leaders, and that all decision you make now on their behalves, must be trained on the more facile resolution of the peoples' future and newer challenges. It will not be useful to abandon your traditional partners as you forge new partnerships for reductio ad absurdum is always risible cantonment. Insist on fair and honest dealing with your newer partners as you have done with your current, if tepid partnerships. That will enhance dynamic growth and development for your great peoples.

Thank you, Gentlemen all,

Haruna Darbo