Abstract:
The Executive secretariat of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) formally began to function in 1977. Immediately after, a debilitating dispute erupted between the secretariat and the ECOWAS Fund for Cooperation, Compensation and Development. The dispute started as a procedural disagreement involving the community chief executive officers and later, snowballed into an administrative and personality debacle that sapped the regions’ communal enthusiasms, stagnated the secretariats’ functions and impeded its capacity to effectively superintend the West African regional integration process. Using historical techniques, this article perused available data, official reports and minutes of meetings of the ECOWAS authority and council of Ministers to examine the administrative and personality dimensions of the disputes, the efforts made in resolving them and the impact they had on ECOWAS formation and the region’s nascent integration process.
Keywords: ECOWAS Executive Secretariat, ECOWAS Fund for Cooperation, Compensation and Development, ECOWAS Executive Secretary, Managing Director of ECOWAS Fund, West African integration
DOI: 10.36349/sokotojh.2025.v13i01.012
author/Ahmad Dahiru Aminu & Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja
journal/Sokoto JH | Vol. 13, Issue 1 | Dec. 2025
