Dr Godknows Igali is a former Nigeria Ambassador to Sweden, Denmark and Norway. He is also the First Vice President of the Academy of International Affairs of Nigeria. In this interview with WALE AKINSELURE, he speaks on the recent exit of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali from the Economic Community of West African States and how Africa should deal with the leadership of America under President Donald Trump

What are the implications of the recent exit of some Sahelian countries from the ECOWAS for the sub-region and the African continent?

First and foremost, it is their sovereign right to enter into any alliance or any relationship with other countries, whether in the immediate geographical zone of West Africa, on the African continent, or in the world. It is their legitimate right. So they’ve not done anything wrong from that point of view. Nobody can force any country to join a body they don’t want. So, it is an exercise of their sovereign right that they have taken that action. The implications are multifarious. First, and that’s one thing that I want us all to recognise, is that the ECOWAS body, which is going to be 50 years old in May this year, has always allowed for micro-relationships between one, two or three countries. So even by the time ECOWAS was formed, there were other small associations between one or two of the countries and when they became members of ECOWAS, the commission did not give them a precondition to say, ‘don’t have a relationship between yourselves if you want to join ECOWAS’. For example, there was something between Nigeria, Togo, and Ghana, called the Co-Prosperity Zone, which came up. It was informal, very informal. Ghana, Togo, and Nigeria decided to form a kind of pseudo-union. This is as recent as about 25 years ago, when we called it the Co-Prosperity Zone, for us to associate ourselves and deal with issues common to us. So at the beginning of ECOWAS, we had various unions. There was the Union of Canada, the Union of the Francophone countries, and the Union of other countries around the Gambia. And they allowed them to continue. The fact that there is a micro-relationship existing within ECOWAS is not a misnomer. It has existed before and ECOWAS allowed it.

https://punchng.com/with-china-trump-cant-be-aggressive-towards-africa-ex-ambassador-igali/