The ECOWAS 2020 Transformational Vision: Content, Context, Issues and Prospects

This article examines the content, contexts and issues in the ECOWAS 2020 Transformational Vision with the goal of outlining the prospects for its actualization. Following an extensive review of extant literature on regional integration as well as relevant studies on regional integration in West Africa, the article argues that that as long as the structures that, in the last four decades, have worked to frustrate the ECOWAS’ goal of an integrated community are still alive and active, the 2020 Transformational Vision, though an ambitious agenda, going by the philosophical ideas undergirding it, like similar ideas and visions of the distant and recent past, is likely to be unrealizable. It concludes that the 2020 Vision should be viewed as another ‘development tokenism’ by the sub-region’s statesmen and policymakers to appease radical voices in the sub-region and not really as an attempt to democratize regional development