Five days after the first ECOWAS–AES ministerial, Ghana’s Mahama asks the juntas to open up
Dakar produced working groups and a signed communiqué but no date for a second meeting. Ghana’s president then publicly set the condition the Sahel states have spent three years refusing.
The first ministerial session of the ECOWAS–AES Dialogue on Cooperation met in Dakar on Saturday 17 October, the first official ministerial contact since Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger left the bloc on 29 January 2025. Talks had run since that date, but only at consultation level. The session was co-chaired by Cheikh Niang, Senegal’s foreign minister and president of the ECOWAS Council of Ministers, and Karamoko Jean-Marie Traoré, Burkina Faso’s foreign minister and chairman of the AES Ministerial Steering Committee. The parties signed an eight-point communiqué, agreed to form joint thematic working groups toward a framework cooperation agreement, and scheduled expert-level technical talks for the following day. Future relations, they said, would be guided by “good-neighbourliness, respect for sovereignty, dignity and the welfare of West African populations.” No date was fixed for the next ministerial.
On 22 October, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation reported President John Dramani Mahama urging the AES states to accept outside help against jihadist groups. “In Ghana, we work with the UK. We work with Germany. We work with France. We work with the US. We share intelligence. We do training together,” Mahama said. “I believe that the AES countries should open up so that anybody who’s interested in assisting in the fight against terrorism should be able to do so. Especially, we need a new framework of cooperation in West Africa.” GBC’s account does not state the venue or occasion for the remarks. Separately, the aggregation site ModernGhana reported that Russia’s foreign minister had told his Ghanaian counterpart Moscow was ready to support normalisation between ECOWAS and the AES; The Files found no Russian ministry readout or wire confirmation and does not treat that claim as established.
Assessment: The absent next date is the item to watch. Working groups and a framework agreement are the vocabulary of talks that both sides need to be seen holding: ECOWAS has lost a third of its territory and its principal security problem, while the juntas want trade continuity without the political conditions that drove the exit. Mahama, the bloc’s de facto interlocutor with Bamako, Ouagadougou and Niamey, has now attached a price in public five days after Dakar — and the Western partnerships he lists are precisely what the three governments expelled. Treat the Russian brokerage story as unverified until a primary readout appears; it is the kind of claim that circulates because it is plausible, not because it is sourced.