Your Excellency,
ECOWAS crisis – SPORTS to the rescue.
On behalf of all Nigerians, I salute you, sir.
In the year 2002, I was an emissary of former President Olusegun Obasanjo GCFR. I was head of a delegation that was sent with letters to 4 Presidents on the West Coast of Africa.
At each of the countries’ capitals my contingent and I were well received and lavishly feted.
When we met with the President of Ghana at the time, John Kofi Agyekum Kufour, his praise for the role and leadership of Nigeria in Africa was inspiring. When Nigeria coughed, he said, the rest of West Africa caught cold. What Nigeria wanted in the sub-region, Nigeria got.
It is common knowledge that Nigeria had fought many wars and spent fortunes in order to protect and support several African countries, and to keep the fire of unity and collaboration in the continent burning.
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For decades, the whole of West Africa looked towards Nigeria’s leadership in order to develop more rapidly, remove the last vestiges of colonialism and eliminate the political, social and cultural differences between the countries.
President Obasanjo’s letter was to introduce to the 4 other leaders a global event that would involve and impact the entire region, and indirectly implement the primary goals of ECOWAS – 15 West African countries working as a community without restrictive borders, with a common currency, a common airline, a common visa, a common security apparatus, a common market, a superhighway and a rail system running across the region from Dakar in the West to Calabar in the East, mostly along a wasting coastline, all 3000 miles of it.
It was a great project that would have created 8 years of unprecedented collaboration, development and an economic boom driven by soft-power tools – Sport, culture and entertainment.
The simple plan was for West Africa to jointly host a scheduled global event that would facilitate, catalyse, accelerate and enforce the implementation of the ECOWAS vision, a most ambitious infrastructural, economic, social and cultural development in West Africa to be led by Nigeria.
It was an ingenious plan.
It did not see the light of day, however, only and simply because it was ‘too good to be true’. Many in positions of authority under-estimated (and many still do) the power of soft power tools like sport, music and film to achieve what has eluded many generations of West African political juggernauts with their limited appreciation and exploitation of soft-power diplomacy tools for decades till now.
To date, the dream of a functional and productive Economic Community of West African States has remained a project in ‘slow motion’. The region’s history is littered with ‘weak’ leaders laden with the ‘garbage’ of colonialism that cripples ideas beneficial to the people, limits the power of governments, and keeps the people wallowing in poverty in the midst of plenty.
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In order to succeed, ECOWAS would always need a visionary and courageous Nigerian leader to pilot it. Why Nigeria? Nigeria has been the major country in the region with all the essential ingredients (resources, population, capacity, etc) to lead the body and kick-start a true cultural and economic renaissance.
In 2002, President Olusegun Obasanjo was ‘sold’ the idea of what a soft-power tool, football, could do but he stepped away from it all at the last minute for other political expediencies at the time, and conceded the bid to host the first football World Cup to be held in Africa to South Africa. That’s how ECOWAS lost a golden opportunity to achieve the dreams of its founding fathers through sport. West Africa, not South Africa, should have hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010.
Today, the transformations ongoing in Morocco and in several parts of the Middle East, largely driven and fueled by sport, is a clear testimony to Sport being a powerful tool for the development.
My President, I am drawing your attention to that incident in 2002 because you are the current Chairman of ECOWAS, at a time when the organisation faces an existential threat, desperately seeking a courageous and visionary leader to steer it away from the precipice.
Some months ago, 3 member States of ECOWAS, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, shockingly announced their withdrawal from the body.
Unfortunately, when Nigeria coughs these days, not many countries in the sub-region still catch the cold infection. The countries have disregarded all the threats to ‘deal with them’ without any consequence in sight. It is a major set back for Nigeria in many ways that I won’t go into here.
However, Africa is watching to see what ECOWAS, under you, will do to woo back the angry renegade States, and prepare the sub region to join the rest of the continent that must come together as a common front, or perish, in an emerging new World Order.
The implication of the breakup of ECOWAS is too dire for the Black person on earth to even contemplate. The spirit of over 6 million people from West Africa that were sold into slavery must be quivering in their graves. In other for their descendants to ‘return’ to their roots, West Africa must unite and be a part of the army of a new, Black and African consciousness and civilization in a new World Order of things.
Now, the sub-region has been thrown into a state of confusion, and the future looks very uncertain. All of this, under your Chairmanship of ECOWAS.
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It is obvious that Nigeria’s days of an industrial and military power in Africa are gone, probably, forever. So, the time to be inventive and to come up with new ideas to slow down the slide of ECOWAS into anomie is here.
You may not know it, Mr. President, but a totally unrelated development is demonstrating your capacity as a man of courage and vision.
You are, indeed, a man of uncommon courage to have taken on the construction of the Calabar to Lagos coastal superhighway, despite the legion of Nigerians berating you for what they see as wasteful and unnecessary at this time. Even as I may also share a little of such sentiments because of how the entire project was embarked upon, I can see, beneath the surface of things, a broader picture of the huge possibilities and opportunities that the project presents, mostly that of a gigantic road project that, if expanded as envisioned in the ECOWAS master plan, will become the ‘first mile’ in a journey that would traverse the 3000 miles of, hitherto, wasting coastline of West Africa, and create the biggest coastline economy in the world. That road can extend and run from Calabar to Dakar!
I drove from Lagos to Abidjan just over a year ago and can testify to that possibility if only ECOWAS does not disintegrate. That is, presently, a knotty and irritating challenge for you, I know.
Besides whatever else you may be doing now to facilitate the rapid return of all the renegade members back into ECOWAS, you may want to be interested in also what the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, NIIA, is putting up soon, an intellectual discourse to revisit 2002 – a plan to deploy soft power diplomacy tools to revive and revamp the original spirit of ECOWAS in a Friendship Games amongst all the countries in West Africa.
This will provide a period of sports, culture, entertainment and an intellectual colloquium that will ease tensions, bring the ‘family’ of ECOWAS together again, and use that to start a healing process.
Where guns, threats and politics have failed, Sport can provide a soothing balm to thaw strained relationships, bring the warring parties to the conversation table.
Think about it, Sir – a West African Friendship Games for the youths as one of the tools to rescue ECOWAS.
I thank you, Sir, for taking the time to read through my long but humble ‘sermon’.
Your humble subject.
