ECOWAS Holds 89th Ordinary Session of Council of Ministers as body sets to implement the regional action plan to defeat terrorism

Oru Leonard

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has said it is set to implement the regional action plan to defeat terrorism and achieve economic prosperity to improve the livelihoods of people in the community.

Speaking in his opening remark, the President of ECOWAS Commission, Omar Alieu Touray said the task of ensuring that the programmes and projects of ECOWAS are redesigned to ensure a higher impact on the lives of the Community citizens and also foster close cooperation among member states and economic integration of the sub-region.

He emphasized the necessity to work on improving partnerships and coordination with Member States, development partners and civil society.

Touray also disclosed that while working on repositioning the Community institutions, the commission also has the task of continuing with efforts to restore constitutionalism in Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea and to halt the reversals of democracy in the region through instituting a stronger regime against all forms of anti-constitutional changes of government.

According to him, “On the other hand, we have terrorism and violent extremism that persists in our region and threaten to spread from the Sahel to the coastal states.

“ECOWAS is required to pool together different initiatives in the sub-region and coordinate the effective implementation of its regional action plan against terrorism”.

The President noted that those factors in the Community which is the socio-economic impact of the War in Ukraine have come home to the region in the form of energy and food price and inflation in the Member States.

“More than ever before, our region requires solidarity and close coordination of efforts to succeed in overcoming the challenges and forging a future of prosperity for all.

“It is in view of this diagnosis of the state of our Community that we identified four strategic objectives that would be the focus of our Management in the next four years.

“We call this the Commissions 4 by 4 (4 x 4) comprising specific deliverables or results to be realised within our mandate”.

Touray disclosed that: “the first objective is Enhanced Peace and Security, where we intend to fully implement the ECOWAS Action Plan against Terrorism, fully operationalise the ECOWAS Maritime Security Architecture, fully operationalise the National Early Warning and Response Centres and build synergy with the ECOWAS Early Warning and Response Mechanism, and continuously build ECOWAS mediation and response capacity”.

“The second objective is to Deepen Regional Integration, and here we intend to invest time and resources in reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers in our Community and improve the business environment for our private sector, fully operationalise the regional payment system to reduce the difficulty of transactions in local currencies and over-reliance on international currencies (the US dollars/euros); we also intend to introduce ECOWAS VISA, at the first instance for diplomatic and service passports”.

He said the third strategic objective is Good Governance, including good corporate governance to build confidence in our private sector.

“We will be focusing on building a stronger regime against anti-constitutional changes of government and supporting our Member States to deepen democracy”.