From Kabbah to Koroma: A look at Nigeria’s run as West Africa’s crisis manager

When Ernest Bai Koroma left Nigeria for Freetown this week, treason charges dropped. While he escorted home by two former Nigerian presidents, it fit a script Nigeria has run again and again since the 1990s. Whenever a west African political crisis threatens to spiral, there’s a good chance Nigeria ends up brokering the exit, hosting the exile, or putting boots on the ground to force a resolution.

Sierra Leone, 1997–1998:

This is the first modern template. When a junior officers’ coup ousted democratically elected President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in May 1997, he fled to Conakry, Guinea, to run a government-in-exile. But it was Nigeria that did the heavy lifting to get him back: Nigerian troops made up the overwhelming majority of the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) force, which imposed a blockade, fought the junta, and eventually retook Freetown, restoring Kabbah to power in February 1998. Nigeria bore most of the financial and military cost of the intervention under General Sani Abacha’s government.

Liberia, 2003–2006:

When Liberia’s civil war reached its endgame, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo helped broker the deal that got Charles Taylor to step down: exile in Calabar, in Nigeria’s southeast, in exchange for leaving power. Taylor arrived in August 2003 to a formal welcome from four African heads of state. Nigeria held him for nearly three years, resisting international pressure to hand him over until Liberia’s new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, formally requested his extradition in 2006. Nigeria complied, and Taylor was eventually convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

The Gambia, 2017:

When Yahya Jammeh refused to accept his election defeat to Adama Barrow, Nigeria’s House of Representatives voted to authorize an asylum offer if he stepped down peacefully. President Muhammadu Buhari personally led a regional delegation to Banjul to make the case, backed by an ECOWAS force on standby to remove Jammeh by force if talks failed. In the end, Jammeh took exile in Equatorial Guinea instead of Nigeria but the episode highlighted Nigeria’s default instinct: offer the embattled leader a soft landing to avoid bloodshed, with the threat of hard power kept in reserve.

Niger, 2023–Present:

Since the July 2023 coup that ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, Nigeria has been the loudest voice pushing Niger’s junta to release him. Reporting has suggested Nigeria has quietly pressured the junta to let Bazoum and his family leave the country and resettle abroad, rather than insisting on his reinstatement. As of now, the junta has resisted even that softened demand, and Bazoum remains in detention — an unresolved case that shows the limits of Nigeria’s leverage when a junta simply refuses to play along.

Sierra Leone, Again: Ernest Bai Koroma

Which brings the pattern full circle. After the November 2023 uprising in Freetown, Koroma was charged with treason; an ECOWAS-brokered arrangement sent him into exile in Nigeria in January 2024. With the charges formally dropped in mid-2026, he returned home this past week escorted, fittingly, by two former Nigerian presidents, Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, alongside Nigeria’s foreign minister.