People in Bamako, the capital of Mali, share their views on the announcement on January 28 that their country, along with their two neighbours, Niger and Burkina Faso, has quit the West African bloc ECOWAS. Aboubacar Diarra, a trader, welcomes the news: "If you left Mali for Ghana with ECOWAS papers, you still had to pay at the Ghanaian border, at the Burkina Faso border. [...] We've always had problems here, so leaving is the same thing," he says. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES