This week, Sierra Leone had the honour of hosting the 69th Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government and I was privileged to attend as an invited guest. But as I listened to President after President speak of one market, one people and one shared destiny, I found myself thinking less about Sierra Leone than about West Africa itself, stretching from Dakar to Lagos, in whose name these gatherings are always convened. The vision set out for our region’s future, its emphasis on peace, on democratic governance, on investing in our young people, was genuinely the kind of thinking West Africa needs. And yet I left the hall dwelling not on the vision, which we have heard in one form or another for half a century, but on the harder and less flattering question these occasions rarely confront. Why, after fifty years of summits exactly like this one, has so little of it actually arrived?
Let me put the shortfall in a single figure, because it is the most honest way to see it. ECOWAS is nearly half a century old. It has a common external tariff, a regional parliament, a court of justice, protocols on the free movement of people and goods and shelves upon shelves of well-drafted strategy. After all of that, the share of West African trade conducted with other West African countries remains below 10%. Barely one trade in ten stays in the region. In Asia the figure is around 60%; within the European Union, close to the same. Those regions built genuine single markets and their prosperity is inseparable from that fact. We have built the institutions of a common market and largely failed to build the common market itself. A region of over four hundred million people, one of the youngest and potentially most dynamic markets on earth, still trades as fifteen small economies rather than one large one.
This is the pattern I want to name, because until we name it honestly we will keep repeating it. Our regional problem has almost never been a shortage of vision. It has been a chronic failure of delivery. Agreements are signed and then not implemented; tariffs are harmonized on paper while the roadblocks multiply in practice. We do not have an ideas deficit in West Africa. We have an execution deficit and it is expensive. It is paid by the trader whose goods rot at a crossing, by the farmer locked out of a market a hundred miles away, by the young person whose skills stop at a line on a map.
I do not say this from the outside. Part of my working life has been spent inside these regional programmes, building the practical machinery of cooperation: strengthening seed systems across borders, moving improved technology and research between countries and promoting their adoption by farmers and processors and facilitating trade in agricultural produce from one country to another. I also worked on the harder, less visible task beneath all of that, harmonizing the policies and protocols that are supposed to let technology and goods move freely in the first place. So I know from experience both what integration can achieve and how stubbornly it is obstructed in practice.
Nothing taught me this more sharply than the regional response to Ebola. As the epidemic swept through our countries and threatened to become a food crisis on top of a health one, I was given responsibility for coordinating Sierra Leone’s response, working with ECOWAS, CORAF and our regional partners to keep farmers producing and to move urgently needed seeds and agricultural inputs across borders. We had the regional protocols. We had the letters of instruction. And still the trucks were stopped at the borders, each country adding its own further demands before it would let them through. At one crossing we were reduced to offloading the cargo from trucks on one side and reloading it onto other trucks on the other, simply to move seed a few metres across a line on the map, in the middle of an emergency. The agreements existed; the delivery did not. That is our regional problem in a single image and I have stood in it.
And here I want to be fair, because a story of nothing but failure would be both unjust and untrue. West Africa has delivered, when it has chosen to. The West African Power Pool is slowly stitching our national grids into a shared market for electricity, so that power generated in one country can light homes and run factories in another. After the Ebola epidemic tore through our region, we built cross-border disease surveillance and coordination that has since helped us respond faster to health threats no single country could contain alone. Our regional research and agricultural institutions have successfully moved improved seed varieties, farming technologies and knowledge across borders, raising productivity and strengthening food security. These are not small things and they prove the essential point: integration is not a fantasy. It works, when we make it work. The question is why we do so only occasionally, and in patches, rather than as a matter of course.
What makes the failure so costly is that the rewards of getting it right are not abstract. They are intensely concrete and they land in ordinary lives. When a regional market genuinely works, a Sierra Leonean farmer can sell her surplus rice or cocoa into a market of hundreds of millions rather than a few thousand local buyers. When transport corridors are built and maintained, the cost of moving goods falls and with it the price of everything a family buys. When qualifications are recognized across borders, a young graduate from Makeni can compete for work in Accra or Abidjan without starting again from nothing. When our countries pool their effort against the shocks that respect no border, insecurity, climate change, the next pandemic, each of us is stronger than we could ever be alone. And there is a larger prize still. The African Continental Free Trade Area promises the whole continent as a single market, but ECOWAS will only seize that opportunity if it first succeeds in making its own regional market work. We cannot trade freely with Africa while we still cannot trade freely among ourselves.
It is also worth being clear about who actually does the integrating. Governments sign agreements, but businesses create trade. The real work of building one West African economy will be done by manufacturers and truck drivers, by exporters and logistics firms, by the market trader expanding across a border and the investor who decides to treat our region as one market of four hundred million rather than fifteen fragmented ones. The task of Government is not to perform this work but to make it possible: to clear the obstacles, build and maintain the corridors, harmonize the standards and then get out of the way. Where we have made trade easy, our people have always found a way to trade. Where we have made it hard, no summit communiqué has ever persuaded a lorry through a closed border.
There is a hard reality we must also face squarely, because it shadows every conversation about the region’s future. Some member states have chosen to withdraw and the unity ECOWAS was built to embody is under real strain. I will not pretend that away. But I would say this. The forces that make integration necessary do not care about our disagreements. Our geography is still shared. Our rivers and roads still cross the same borders. A pest or a drought or an armed group still moves between our countries as though the lines on the map were not there. Precisely because the political mood has turned, the practical case for cooperation matters more, not less. When grand union is difficult, the answer is not to abandon the project but to make it deliver concretely enough that its value becomes undeniable. You rebuild belief in integration not with another declaration, but by making it work for someone.
Integration also depends on honesty about the responsibilities that come with size. A region of this scale cannot be built by its largest economies alone nor by its smaller ones acting without them. Nigeria cannot integrate West Africa by itself and neither can Sierra Leone; but each carries a responsibility proportionate to its weight and the larger economies bear a particular duty to keep their borders and markets genuinely open, since it is their scale that makes the regional market worth the name. This is a shared enterprise between French-speaking and English-speaking West Africa alike, between Abidjan and Accra, Dakar and Freetown, Cotonou and Lagos. It succeeds for all of us together or it succeeds for none of us.
So what should a serious country, and a serious leader, actually do? The first answer is to stop waiting. Too much of our regional strategy assumes integration must arrive from the top, handed down by the region as a whole, moving at the speed of its most reluctant member. That is a recipe for permanent waiting. A capable country does not wait. It moves to capture the gains already within its reach: cutting the non-tariff barriers and unofficial charges within its own control that make its own traders uncompetitive, fixing its own side of the corridor, aligning its own standards so its goods can actually be sold abroad, positioning itself as a reliable link in regional value chains rather than a bottleneck in them. Sierra Leone cannot integrate the region by itself. But it can make itself the easiest country in the region to trade with and that is a decision within our own hands.
The second answer is deceptively modest: if our failure is delivery, then we must measure delivery. One of the more significant proposals to emerge this week was for an annual regional integration dashboard, a public accounting of what has actually been implemented against what was promised. It is an idea worth embracing and I would go further and say every serious Government should keep its own. Africa has never lacked ambitious plans; what it has lacked is the discipline to track them honestly and the humility to be judged by results. What gets measured, and published, and debated, is what gets done. What is merely declared is what gets forgotten.
This is, in the end, the same argument I make about my own country, raised to the regional level. A plan is not a result. A summit is not a road. A communiqué is not a job. Regional integration will not be judged by the officials who attend summits, but by the citizens who live with the results: whether a trader can cross a border without paying a bribe, whether an entrepreneur can reach customers in the next country, whether a student can study across the region and an investor comes to see West Africa as one economic space rather than fifteen separate ones. Until it is felt in ordinary life, integration remains an aspiration rather than an achievement.
So the dream of One West Africa is worth holding, not as a slogan for the next summit, but as a practical promise to the ordinary people in whose name it is always invoked. Its future will not be decided in our conference halls. It will be decided at our borders and in our ports, on our farms and in our factories and in the daily choice of Governments to deliver what they have promised. That is where integration will either succeed or fail. And it will be built, if it is built at all, the same way everything of lasting value is built in this region and in this country: by choosing what works, doing it well and finishing what we start.
Written as Sierra Leone hosts the 69th Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government. It argues that West Africa’s integration has never wanted for vision, only for delivery and asks what a serious region does about that.
