Niger has not reopened its border with Benin days after a West African bloc lifted coup-linked sanctions on the landlocked nation, including border closures, local officials said Monday.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Saturday said it was lifting sanctions imposed after last year’s military coup, including a no-fly zone, border closures and asset freezes.
“There has still been no change on the Niger side: so far the border hasn’t been opened, so we’re still waiting,” local journalist Fhadel Alou told AFP, speaking in the Niger border town of Gaya.
“The border has reopened on the Benin side,” he added.
Two Nigerien officials confirmed the border with Benin “remained closed”.
Niger’s president Mohamed Bazoum was ousted in a military coup last July, prompting ECOWAS to suspend trade and impose tough sanctions.
But the bloc’s warning of military intervention has fizzled out with little sign that Bazoum — still held in the presidential palace — is close to being restored.
The Nigerien military is still blocking a bridge on the frontier, residents on the Benin side of the border said.
Before the border closure, the Niger-Benin corridor handled 80 percent of Niger’s freight via the Beninese port of Cotonou, some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from the Niger capital Niamey.
After the sanctions led to a decline in the port’s revenues, Benin announced it was lifting the suspension of Nigerien imports transiting through Cotonou.
ECOWAS announced Sunday it was also easing sanctions against Guinea and Mali, which too have witnessed coups, after an emergency summit.
The ECOWAS move signals a desire to renew dialogue with military regimes among its members after Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso announced their intention to leave the bloc.
In February, the West African regional bloc started lifting most sanctions imposed on Niger over 2023’s coup, in a new push for dialogue following a series of political crises that have rocked the region in recent months.
A no-fly zone and border closures were among the sanctions being lifted “with immediate effect”, the president of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission, Omar Alieu Touray, said on Saturday.
The lifting of the sanctions is “on purely humanitarian grounds” to ease the suffering caused as a result, Touray told reporters after the bloc’s summit in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
The summit aimed to address existential threats facing the region as well as implore three military-led nations that have quit the bloc – Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso – to rescind their decision.
The three were suspended from ECOWAS following recent coups.
Since then, they have declared their intention to permanently withdraw from the bloc, but ECOWAS has called for the three states to return.
Speaking in his opening remarks at the start of the summit, ECOWAS chairman and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said the bloc “must re-examine our current approach to the quest for constitutional order in four of our Member States”, referring to the three suspended countries, as well as Guinea, which is also military-led.
Tinubu urged Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso to “reconsider the decision” and said they should “not perceive our organisation as the enemy”.
ECOWAS also said it had lifted certain sanctions on Malian individuals and some on junta-led Guinea, which has not said it wants to leave the bloc but has also not committed to a timeline to return to democratic rule.
Touray said some targeted sanctions and political sanctions remained place for Niger, without giving details.
Reporting from the summit in Abuja, Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris said, “Almost all the sanctions imposed on Niger have been lifted,” including land, sea, and air blockades, and sanctions barring Niger from economic and financial institutions in the region.
However, ECOWAS placed “some conditions” on the lifting of the sanctions, he added. “They want the immediate release of President Mohamed Bazoum and members of his family.”
Niger’s President Bazoum was deposed in a military coup last July, prompting ECOWAS to suspend trade and impose sanctions on the country. He is still imprisoned in the presidential palace in Niamey. On the eve of the summit, his lawyers urged ECOWAS to demand his release.
Earlier, ECOWAS co-founder and former Nigerian military leader General Yakubu Gowon also called for the bloc to lift “all sanctions that have been imposed on Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Niger”.
“Even before today’s summit, there has been a change in tone, in language and also the approach of ECOWAS entirely to the sanctions and embargoes imposed on these three West African countries,” Idris said.
Easing sanctions is seen as a gesture of appeasement as ECOWAS tries to persuade the three states to remain in the nearly 50-year-old alliance and rethink a withdrawal. Their planned exit would undermine regional integration efforts and bring a messy disentanglement from the bloc’s trade and services flows, worth nearly $150bn a year.
ECOWAS on Saturday gave the three military-led countries “an opportunity to be members of the organisation once again”, Idris said, adding that they asked them to be part of “technical discussions of the ECOWAS bloc” without restoring them as full participating heads of state at summits or major conferences.
After Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger announced that they would permanently withdraw from the alliance and formed a grouping called the Alliance of Sahel States, “the ECOWAS institution itself was shaken”, Idris said.
“[ECOWAS] is an organisation that is gradually losing its steam, and there is the danger of it being fragmented … There is also the concern that unless ECOWAS brings these people back into the fold, there is the danger of coups spreading in West Africa,” he added.
