Really? The most stable?

On paper, it sounds like a hard sell. Coups in the Sahel, a 17-year insurgency in Nigeria, schools being raided. Yet ECOWAS is adamant: West Africa is still holding together better than any other region on the continent.

And they might have a point.

Speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), ECOWAS Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Amb. Abdel-Fatau Musah, said the sub-region has faced what he called an “existential threat” from terrorism — but hasn’t collapsed because regional leaders actually built something to prevent it.

“If you see the sub-region, in spite of terrorism, West Africa today is the most stable region among all the regions in Africa,” Musah argued.

His logic? There’s no active state-vs-state war in West Africa. You can’t say that for much of the rest of the continent — think Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, and the DRC, all locked in brutal, protracted conflicts.

So, what’s keeping West Africa from unravelling?

According to cbinews.tv, Musah points to two decades of boring-but-important architecture.

For background, ECOWAS itself was founded in Lagos back in 1975 as an economic project, but it was forced to become a security outfit after the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. That led to the landmark 1999 Protocol on the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeeping and Security — the legal backbone for interventions like ECOMOG.

Musah says the current resilience is built on that protocol, plus its alignment with the African Union’s African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA IV) and the Africa Governance Architecture.

Two tools get special mention:

1. The Early Warning System. A network of field monitors feeding into the ECOWAS Early Warning and Response Network (ECOWARN). Musah says this has been “very important in trying to make sure that we sort of defuse tensions before they blow up into crisis.”

2. Centres of Excellence: Now researching 21st-century threats — including how misinformation and disinformation fuel violence.

It’s a clear shift from reactive peacekeeping to preventive diplomacy.

The big, scary context

Let’s be frank, the threat is massive. The 2024 Global Terrorism Index shows the epicentre of global terrorism has moved from the Middle East into sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahel alone accounted for 51% of all global terrorism deaths in 2024 — almost ten times the figure in 2019.

That’s why the numbers around ECOWAS’s response keep changing. Musah spoke of a 1,500-strong Counterterrorism Brigade under the ECOWAS Standby Force. But at the inaugural African Chiefs of Defence Staff Summit in Abuja in August 2025, ECOWAS Commission President Dr Omar Touray upped the ante dramatically — announcing plans for a 260,000-strong rapid deployment brigade, with a $2.5bn fund to support frontline states.

The message from the Commission is blunt: “If terrorism was allowed to fester, then we should forget about regional integration.”

Get up to speed — Nigeria at the centre

You can’t talk about this without talking about Nigeria. The country is still battling Boko Haram and ISWAP, 17 years on. The fallout is staggering.

Save the Children estimates at least 1,683 learners were abducted between 2014 and 2022, while UNICEF said insecurity forced 11,536 schools to shut during the 2020/2021 session, disrupting 1.3 million children.

And the crisis is still live. On 15 May 2026, armed men attacked three schools in Ahoro Esiele/Esiele and Yawota in Oyo State’s Oriire LGA, abducting pupils and teachers.

Politically, the bloc is under strain too. In December, ECOWAS declared a state of emergency across the region after a wave of coups and attempted power seizures — from Mali and Burkina Faso to Niger and Guinea — which saw three Sahelian states form their own breakaway Alliance of Sahel States.

Add to that a new international dimension: in February, the US deployed a small team of troops to Nigeria following Christmas Day airstrikes, the first public confirmation of US boots on Nigerian soil in years. Reports suggest US surveillance flights had been operating over Nigeria from neighbouring Ghana since late November.

It’s a lot. Which is exactly why ECOWAS is arguing that staying intact at all is an achievement.

Source: cbinews.tv

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