Four customs services meet in Ouagadougou to build a tariff lane through Lomé
Experts from Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo opened a three-day session on 12 October to draft a confederal preferential tariff and interconnect their customs IT systems. It is the juntas' answer, on paper, to the trade corridors JNIM has been burning.
Customs experts from the three Alliance of Sahel States members and Togo’s Office Togolais des Recettes convened in Ouagadougou on Monday 12 October for a session running to 14 October, according to APA News and the Burkinabè site leFaso.net. The stated purpose is to finalise a draft decision establishing a preferential tariff regime between the AES confederation and Togo, and to link the four administrations' customs IT systems. Proceedings were opened by Yves Kafando, Director-General of Customs of Burkina Faso. The sequencing, per leFaso.net, puts AES experts alone on 12-13 October and the AES-plus-Togo format after; all of it is a curtain-raiser for the fifth meeting of AES customs directors-general and the OTR commissioner-general in Ouagadougou on 15-16 October, which is to review implementation of recommendations from the previous session in Bamako.
Nothing was instituted on Monday. What was agreed is a venue and a draft. But the direction matters, because the three landlocked states have spent thirteen months watching their import corridors attacked. JNIM has run a blockade on fuel moving into southern Mali since 3 September 2025, targeting tanker convoys from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, with Kayes, Koulikoro, Ségou, Mopti and Sikasso affected; Human Rights Watch’s 2026 World Report describes JNIM increasingly striking economic infrastructure to weaken state authority. Mali24 frames Lomé's positioning as pragmatic diplomacy “face aux tensions avec d’autres pays côtiers” — the unnamed parties being Benin and Côte d’Ivoire. Africa Defense Forum reported in February that ECOWAS heads of state decided on 14 December 2025 to maintain dialogue with the three, and noted Benin-Niger relations as particularly hostile.
Assessment: Read this as the juntas trying to convert a security problem into a logistics one. If the corridor from Abidjan is a battlefield and the corridor from Cotonou is a political hostage, Lomé becomes the single point of failure they are choosing voluntarily — which gives Togo quiet leverage over three governments that insist they have stopped accepting leverage. The test is arithmetic, not communiqué: whether the 15-16 October directors-general session produces a tariff with rates attached and a timetable, or another endorsement of a draft. Note also what a preferential regime with a non-member implies about the ECOWAS exit: the bloc was left, the trade geography was not.