The Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, a regional research, advocacy and training organisation for West Africa, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, has called on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to find innovative ways of dealing with growing political instability in the region.
He observed that ECOWAS had a lot of backing in terms of treaties that made the regional body formidable to effectively address the current political issues confronting some member states.
Speaking at a virtual conference organised by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Ghana on the topic: “The return of the military in West Africa,” Prof. Ibrahim pointed out that “ECOWAS can do better than what it is doing right now” because the imposition of sanctions had over the years not yielded the desired results.
The conference attracted 151 participants across Africa and the world. They included diplomats, political scientists, the academia, political analysts and some media practitioners.
Military intervention
He said some suggestions that ECOWAS could use military intervention to compel member states to follow democratic principles were untenable because the regional body at the moment did not have the capacity and resources for such interventions.
Prof. Ibrahim rather advocated that the regional body revised its current interventions with the aim of criticising constitutionally elected Presidents in the region who extend their terms of office.
Prof. Ibrahim, who was the guest speaker, stated that the imposition of sanctions was meant to create difficulties for member states not complying with the tenets of good governance and democracy but those sanctions were not achieving much.
“When a constitutionally elected President extends his tenure, ECOWAS must criticise it just as it will do when there is a coup d’etat in a member state,” Prof. Ibrahim emphasised.
Civic education
Prof. Ibrahim, who is a Nigerian with over 30 years of active engagement with civil society, noted that there was the need to make conscious efforts to educate citizens of each member states to ensure that “a civic culture for democracy” was inculcated in the people.
That, he said, would ultimately help to “consolidate the capacities of member states to build resilience and create favourable conditions for economic development”.
Prof. Ibrahim pointed out that it was possible to achieve that because if other militant groups had over the years succeeded in infusing their values and ideologies into the youth, then ECOWAS member states could also do better to help promote good governance and culture of democracy in West Africa.
