Nigeria, Sept. 25 -- This week, I am in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, attending a conference organised by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on the peace and security landscape in West Africa. The region has been in political turmoil for the past decade, signalling a deterioration of the growing crisis that has affected the zone for decades due to structural problems related to widespread poverty, food insecurity, the climate crisis and insurgency generated by violent extremist jihadi groups. The current phase of the crisis is linked mainly to the rapid collapse of the democratic model that has evolved in the post-1990 era on the impulsion of popular demands and the regional body, ECOWAS.
The coups in Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger and Guine...