West Africa's main regional bloc will close borders with Mali and impose stringent economic sanctions in response to an unacceptable delay by the country in holding promised elections after a 2020 military coup, the organisation said on Sunday.
The Economic Community of West African StatesWest African States ECOWAS has taken a significant shift in its position on Mali, whose interim authorities proposed holding elections in December 2025 instead of February as originally agreed.
In a communiqué issued after an emergency summit in the Ghanaian capital Accra, the ECOWAS said it found the proposed timetable for a transition back to constitutional rule totally unacceptable.
This schedule means that an illegitimate military transition government will take the Malian people hostage, it said.
The 15-member bloc said it had agreed to impose additional sanctions with immediate effect. The closure of members' land and air borders with Mali, suspension of non-essential financial transactions, and the freezing of Malian state assets in ECOWAS commercial banks and the central bank of the eight-nation West African CFA francAfrican CFA franc zone were among these things.
There was no immediate response from the Malian authorities, who blamed the delay partly on the challenge of organising a democratically robust vote amid a violent Islamist insurgency.
Under previous sanctions, Mali's ECOWAS membership is suspended and members of the transitional authority and their relatives are subject to travel bans and asset freezes.
The measures will only be lifted gradually after an acceptable election timeframe is completed and progress is made towards implementing it, ECOWAS said.
The organisation is under pressure to show that it can protect democracy from a backslide to military rule after West and Central Africa saw four coups within 18 months.
After Malian President Boubacar Ibrahim Keita was ousted in 2020, ECOWAS temporarily closed its borders with Mali and halted financial flows - short-term sanctions that caused a fall in imports to the landlocked country.
The political upheaval of Mali has deepened tensions with former colonial power France, which has thousands of troops deployed across West Africa s Sahel region to fight Islamist insurgents.