The Writer
Assessment Three: The AES Negotiation Without Ground Truth
Item 12, the Chief Negotiator’s report on relations with the AES Countries, is where the analytical deficit has its most consequential operational expression.
Dr Lansana Kouyaté has done serious diplomatic work. A two-tier negotiating architecture is in place. Eighteen thematic areas are under discussion. A General Framework Agreement has been drafted. A risk register has been developed identifying forty-eight risks. The Council extended its mandate through December 2026.
The risk register, however, is a diplomatic risk register. It catalogues the risks that the negotiation might fail, that member states might pursue bilateral arrangements, that the framework agreement might not be concluded in time. These are real risks. They are not the analytically most important risks facing the region.
The analytically most important question the Freetown session did not ask is this: what is the relationship between the diplomatic timeline and the security timeline? The negotiation aims to conclude a General Framework Agreement by December 2026 and a Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement within two years thereafter. The security question is whether the armed groups operating in the ungoverned spaces of the three AES states are on a timeline that accommodates that diplomatic schedule.
If a serious intelligence assessment of the ground situation in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger were informing this negotiation, it would be forcing a different set of questions onto the table. Not just whether the AES governments will negotiate in good faith but whether those governments control enough of their territory to deliver on what they are agreeing to. Not just whether ECOWAS can maintain internal cohesion but whether the diplomatic window is being outpaced by the operational timeline of the groups the negotiation is ultimately meant to address.
Captain Traoré in Ouagadougou welcomed the negotiation initiative and directed his Foreign Minister to constitute a negotiating team. That is a diplomatic signal worth noting. An intelligence assessment would also note that the Burkinabè state currently controls, by most open-source estimates, less than half of its national territory.
The government of Burkina Faso negotiating a framework on behalf of Burkina Faso is negotiating on behalf of a state with severely constrained effective sovereignty. That fact should be shaping the structure of the negotiation, the realism of its timelines, and the contingency planning the Council authorises if the negotiation extends beyond the point at which the security situation in the coastal states deteriorates further.
None of that analytical work is visible in the Freetown report. The negotiation is proceeding as if the problem is diplomatic. The problem is partially diplomatic and substantially military-political in a way that requires intelligence analysis to understand.
Assessment Four: The 31,700 Tonne Indicator
Buried in Item 57, under the food security directive, is a single line that the session treated as a logistics problem and that an intelligence assessment would treat as a territorial control indicator.
Thirty-one thousand seven hundred metric tonnes of ECOWAS food reserves are immobilised in AES countries, with a recovery plan directed by March 2027.
Food reserves are immobilised when access to them cannot be guaranteed. Access cannot be guaranteed when the territory in which they are located is not under effective state control. The immobilisation of those reserves is therefore, among other things, evidence of the extent to which the governance situation in the AES states has deteriorated below the threshold at which the infrastructure of regional integration can function.
The intelligence question is not who owns the reserves. It is who controls access to them. In areas where jihadist groups have established what researchers call proto-governance, where they are providing dispute resolution, taxing commerce, and managing local resource access, food stockpiles are governance instruments. They are used to build local legitimacy, to create dependency, and to demonstrate that the non-state actor can deliver what the state cannot.
Whether that dynamic is operating around any of the immobilised ECOWAS food reserves in AES territory is an answerable question. It requires collection and analysis. It has not, based on the Freetown report, been asked by the regional body that owns those reserves.
Assessment Five: The Colonial Inheritance Reproduced at Scale
The fundamental analytical finding of this commentary is structural rather than operational.
West African national intelligence services were built on colonial surveillance architectures designed to watch, record, and report, not to analyse, assess, and advise. That orientation has persisted through independence, through multiple administrations, and through numerous reform attempts. It is not the product of individual failures. It is the product of institutional formation sustained over generations.
When those national services aggregate into the ECOWAS regional architecture, they bring that orientation with them. A regional analytical intelligence function requires member states to contribute assessed intelligence, structured analytical products, not incident reports, to a joint analytical process. Member states that produce incident diaries at the national level cannot contribute analytical assessments at the regional level.
The demand-side failure compounds this. The political leaders who populate ECOWAS summits and Council of Ministers sessions have, for the most part, never consumed analytical intelligence at the national level in the form that would give them the habits of mind to demand it at the regional level. A foreign minister who has never received a structured intelligence brief from his national service will not arrive at an ECOWAS session and ask for a Regional Security Threat Assessment. The demand for analysis has to be built before the supply of analysis can be justified.
This is similar to John Gardner’s institutional dry rot operating at continental scale (in his book “Self-Renewal: The Individual and The Innovative Society”). ECOWAS has the outward architecture of a regional security body; the Early Warning System, the Peace and Security Council framework, the Standby Force, the Conflict Prevention Framework. The analytical intelligence that would animate these structures, that would tell them what to warn about, what to prevent, when to stand ready is absent. The forms of the shells exist. The substance does not.
Assessment Six: What a Corrected Posture Would Require
The 69th Ordinary Session of the Authority of Heads of State and Government, meeting in November 2026 in Lungi, Sierra Leone, should mandate the creation of a Regional Intelligence Assessment Unit within the ECOWAS Commission. The unit’s mandate should be narrow, specific, and analytically serious: produce forward-looking security threat assessments on the Sahelian expansion and its coastal implications, delivered to the Council of Ministers at every ordinary session as a substantive agenda item, in a format equivalent in analytical rigour to what PREGEC produces on food security.
The unit requires four things. (a)Carefully selected persons with rare cognitive abilities trained as Intelligence analysts; not intelligence officers in the operational sense, but analytical professionals trained in structured analytical techniques, capable of producing assessed intelligence products from open-source and liaison intelligence inputs. (b)Cleared liaison relationships with member state intelligence communities; not to collect intelligence directly but to receive assessed contributions from national services and integrate them into a regional picture. (c)Political protection; the analytical function must be insulated from the political pressure to produce comfortable assessments rather than honest ones. (d)And a consumption commitment; the heads of state who mandate the unit must commit to reading what it produces and allowing it to shape their decisions.
The resources required are modest relative to the stakes. The Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra already has some of the training infrastructure. The African Centre for Strategic Research and Studies in Abuja has some of the analytical capacity. The ingredients exist. The political decision to assemble them into a functioning regional analytical intelligence unit does not.
Concluding Assessment
The 96th Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Council of Ministers in Freetown was a competently managed institutional event. Its budget decisions were technically sound. Its appointment processes were meritocratic and produced a useful legal precedent. Its diplomatic engagement on the AES question reflected genuine political commitment.
It was also a session in which the region’s most consequential security challenge- a jihadist territorial expansion that has partitioned three member states and is pressing toward four more was named in an opening speech and never examined analytically again.
The Chair closed the session by saying the true measure of the deliberations would be their impact on West African citizens. The West African citizens living in the communities that extremist recruiters are currently building networks in were not served by this session. They were named. They were not seen.
Seeing them here means understanding the threat environment they inhabit, assessing where it is going, and mobilising the regional instruments against it before the development becomes irreversible. This inevitably requires analytical intelligence of a kind that ECOWAS does not currently produce.
The machinery to produce it can be built. The decision to build it has not been made.
By Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, Former Director General, Bureau of National Intelligence, Ghana
