Guinea-Bissau Waiting for the Wretched ECOWAS

I will try to be brief in this exercise. The idea for this text emerged from a conversation with an old friend of Guinea-Bissau, someone with a deeply knowledge about the country and the internal dynamics of ECOWAS. Like myself, he is profoundly concerned about the situation in the country, as are all those who care about its political and social progress. We agreed on two points. First, ECOWAS is not free of responsibility for the current political situation in Guinea-Bissau. Second, a realistic assessment of the context forces us to acknowledge that this organisation, heavily influenced by Françafrique, will largely determine, at its summit, the outcome of the coup d’état staged by Umaro Sissoco Embaló.

At this very moment, the declared winner of the presidential elections, Fernando Dias da Costa, along with part of his campaign leadership, is in Abuja, Nigeria. They are, perhaps naïvely, placing their hopes in ECOWAS, while an outraged population is mobilising in the streets of Guinea-Bissau to confront the Sissocoist coup.

Tomorrow, 14 December 2025, an ECOWAS Summit of Heads of State and Government will take place in Abuja. Attention will be focused on the situations in Guinea-Bissau and Benin. In the former, a ridiculous “ceremonial coup” has been used to block an electoral process that resulted in the defeat of the divisive and bloodstained dictatorship of Umaro Sissoco Embaló. In the latter, an attempted coup aimed at President Patrice Talon was thwarted. I will briefly return to Benin later. For now, let us focus on Guinea-Bissau, which is the core concern of this reflection.

The history of ECOWAS interventions in Guinea-Bissau, combined with the internal crisis currently affecting the organisation itself, leaves little room to expect a decisive response against Sissoco Embaló’s “ceremonial coup”. Indeed, when ECOWAS chose Umaro Sissoco Embaló to preside over its Summit in July 2022, it did so fully aware that it was placing a key organ of the organisation under the leadership of a dictator. This decision was taken because the internal balance of power within ECOWAS leaned toward interests aligned with the Guinean dictator. These interests were rooted in Senegal, where Macky Sall was then president, and in France, whose traditional indirect influence over ECOWAS operates through well-known satellite states and leaderships in West Africa.

It was entirely predictable that Sissoco Embaló’s presidency of the ECOWAS Summit would deepen the organisation’s crisis. He is skilful in tyrannical manoeuvres, but from an organisational standpoint he represents nothing short of disaster. Following his tenure, ECOWAS entered one of the most disruptive crises in its history. With Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger no longer members, ECOWAS once again demonstrated profound inconsistency in its dealings with member states.

When an attempted coup occurred in Benin, ECOWAS swiftly moved to deploy a military intervention force to protect President Patrice Talon. Yet in Guinea-Bissau, in the face of a blatant assault on the popular will expressed in the elections of 23 November, ECOWAS has still failed to take a clear position in defence of popular sovereignty as a defining principle of constitutional democracy in the country.

Beyond the geographic and socio-political differences between the two countries, there is a key factor explaining ECOWAS’s “double standards”. In Benin, the coup attempt genuinely sought to overthrow a Françafrique regime led by Talon. In Guinea-Bissau, however, the coup leader is Umaro Sissoco Embaló himself, shielded by his alliance with French President Emmanuel Macron, who appears determined to prevent the fall of his political protégé in Guinea-Bissau. France is fighting to preserve its influence in a West Africa that is increasingly slipping from its neo-colonial grasp, from Senegal to the Alliance of Sahel States.

Faced with this situation, ECOWAS will be forced, at tomorrow’s summit, to choose between saving Sissocoism as a regime subservient to internal and external interests entrenched within ECOWAS, or salvaging at least a minimum of its own credibility. If it opts for the former, no attentive observer of the organisation’s nature will be surprised. But if it chooses to respect popular sovereignty in Guinea-Bissau, that decision would not only be decent but entirely feasible, countering the fatalism underpinning the arguments of Sissocoist coup plotters who are determined to nullify elections that were, in essence, already concluded.

How can ECOWAS act in this direction? Several ideas drawn from the conversation that inspired this reflection are fundamental:

First, in response to the invasion of the National Electoral Commission (CNE) by the coup plotters—an action that reduced the institution’s logistical capacity to zero and made it impossible to complete the vote count—the solution lies in resuming the tally from the polling-station result sheets, which form the foundation of the Guinean electoral system. The ECOWAS and African Union electoral observation missions are in possession of these documents.

Second, given a military power structure clearly operating under the direction of Umaro Sissoco Embaló—something evident from the links between each regime member and the former president—ECOWAS should intervene militarily in order to:

i) guarantee security so that the CNE can officially conclude the electoral process after monitoring an alternative recount aimed at reconstructing the results; and

ii) ensure the inauguration of the President of the Republic elected by the people of Guinea-Bissau, Fernando Dias da Costa, in the national parliament.

Third, another option for ECOWAS intervention against the “ceremonial coup” is the application of sanctions measures provided for in the organisation’s protocols against all actors involved in subverting the popular will in Guinea-Bissau. If applied decisively and in coordination with other international organisations, these measures would force the political-military transitional regime to abandon its staged coup and enable the installation of popular will in the governance of Guinea-Bissau.

Any choice by ECOWAS that lends support to the coup-driven transition process in Guinea-Bissau would place the organisation in a position of ridicule, as it would directly contradict the findings of its own electoral observation mission in the country. The head of that mission, Goodluck Jonathan, has no doubt that what is taking place is a “ceremonial coup”, which, as Liberian Senator and ECOWAS MP Edwin Melvin Snowe—also a member of the observation mission—has stated, “benefits only Umaro Sissoco Embaló himself”. Meanwhile, Embaló continues his international tours and pressures ECOWAS institutions, while opposition leaders, including a Guinean ECOWAS parliamentarian, remain imprisoned in the cells of Sissoco Embaló’s dictatorship.

Sumaila Djalo