West Africa’s biggest political and economic bloc, ECOWAS, has sanctioned both Mali and Guinea as a result of the undemocratic takeovers that have violated ECOWAS protocols on Democracy and Good Governance.
Mali’s transitional authorities after they informed the organization that presidential and parliamentary elections will not be held in February.
Mali’s interim government, which gained power after the military deposed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2020, told the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that it would supervise an 18-month transition to democracy, concluding in elections on February 27, 2022.
It has, however, made only intermittent headway in preparing the election and has constantly cautioned that it may be postponed, in part owing to a continuing revolt by armed groups.
As a consequence of an armed insurgency that started in the north in 2012 and spread to the nation’s center and neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, large swaths of the massive country of 19 million people are out of government authority.
ECOWAS said in a statement on Sunday following a summit in Ghana that the interim authorities had informed it “of their inability to meet the transition deadline of February 2022”.
Travel bans and asset freezes on all transitional authority members and select family members are among the restrictions imposed, according to the statement read by the President of the ECOWAS Commission, Jean-Claude Kassi Brou at the ECOWAS’s Extraordinary Summit of the Authority of Heads of State and Government in Accra on Sunday.
According to him, ECOWAS would consider further measures in December if no progress is made.
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Source: Anthony Sasu Ayisadu/ATLFMNEWS
