ECOWAS CALLS FOR INTEGRATED APPROACH TO CONFLICT PREVENTION, MANAGEMENT IN AFRICA T he President of the ECO- WAS Commission, His Excellency Kadré Desiré Ouedraogo has called for the harmonization and coordina- tion of the disparate conflict prevention and management efforts at national levels and their linkage to regional and continental architecture in order to maximize effective- ness and the benefits. “Our individual and collec- tive initiatives to stabilize the region are an indispensable component towards sustaina- ble development and human dignity of our people,” the President said in an address in Accra, Ghana on Monday 9 th September 2013 at the open- ing of a two-day Regional Conference on “Building Nation- al Peace Infrastructures: Strengthening National, Regional and Continental Coordination in Conflict Prevention.” Co-organized by the UNDP, the African Union Commis- sion (AUC) and ECOWAS in consultation with the Govern- ment of Ghana, the Accra meeting is a follow up to the June 2013 consultation in Addis Ababa by the UNDP, AU and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) on the en- hancement of RECs capacities for conflict prevention and mediation. President Ouedraogo, represented by the Commission- er for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Mrs. Salamatu Hussaini Suleiman, noted that while efforts accorded to peace and security by national and regional stakeholders, have succeeded in increasing the resilience of the region to wanton human rights abuses and violent conflicts, much more remains to be accomplished.” He said “the continuing disputes associated with elec- toral processes and the new forms of emerging threats call for a careful review of existing mechanisms,” adding that while “existing regional and national mechanisms tend to emphasize Track I conflict management methodologies,” greater focus should now be placed on local and alterna- tive dispute resolution. “Conflict management should be less compartmental- ized and show structural and organic links between the local, national and the regional efforts,” the ECOWAS chief added. He expressed the hope that through consultation, ECOWAS Member States should be exposed to the initia- tives, tools and opportunities available in constructing viable infrastructure for peace at the national, regional and continental levels. These should include modalities for exchanging best practices and opportunities to build na- tional peace and security architectures, where they do not exist, and to broaden and further strengthen existing in- frastructures There should also be “synergies and collaboration be- tween national and regional infrastructures at the national level; modalities and roadmap for linking national conflict prevention, resolution and peace building initiatives to the regional and continental architectures; and development of a Plan of Action around concrete initiatives and activi- ties for cooperation between the Member States, ECOWAS and the AU on a mutually reinforcing and organic peace and security architecture.” In this regard, the President noted that a pilot study commissioned by the ECOWAS Early Warning Directorate on National Early Warning and Response Mechanisms has generated a draft Regional Policy Framework, which will be discussed with Member States, starting in October, 2013 at the expert level for eventual adoption by the re- gional Mediation and Security Council. Speaking in the same vein at the opening, Ghana’s President, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, noted that the “complex challenges emanating from the changing nature of violence can no longer be met with the old Law and order Concept.” While security forces could be deployed to enforce peace, “such peace is not sustainable so long as the root causes of the conflict are not addressed,” the President affirmed in the speech delivered by Mr. Hannah Tetteh, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration. As a solution, he suggested the Community Security and Social Cohesion approach, which seeks to “create platforms for various actors in conflict contexts to engage constructively and to help develop coherent interventions to enhance peace, security, development and cohesion at the community, regional and national levels, thereby building resilient societies with the capacity to promote tolerance and dialogue.” According to the Ghanaian leader, “the advantage of this approach is that it facilitates engagement on common analysis to understand the drivers of violence and insecu- rity and to develop effective response strategies based on the characteristics of the conflict.” The UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Rep- resentative in Ghana, Ms. Ruby Sandhu-Rojon, reiterated the UN system’s continued support to ECOWAS, AU and their Member States “to promote peace infrastructures in the region.” “Indeed, the United Nations,” she said: “has a duty to help nations develop their own capacity to peacefully resolve their differences and disputes.” Ghana’s Interior Minis- ter Honourable Kwesi Ah- woi explained that “Constructive conflict management is as much a science as an art,” and that developing a national infrastructure for peace in every country’s context “offers national govern- ments the opportunity to acquire a transformative approach to conflict man- ECOWAS Bulletin Volume 22 1 st - 14 th SEPTEMBER, 2013 Mrs. Tetteh Mrs. Suleiman
Transcript
ECOWAS CALLS FOR INTEGRATED APPROACH TO CONFLICT PREVENTION, MANAGEMENT IN AFRICA
T he President of the ECO-WAS Commission, His
Excellency Kadré Desiré Ouedraogo has called for the harmonization and coordina-tion of the disparate conflict prevention and management efforts at national levels and their linkage to regional and continental architecture in order to maximize effective-ness and the benefits. “Our individual and collec-tive initiatives to stabilize the region are an indispensable component towards sustaina-ble development and human dignity of our people,” the President said in an address in Accra, Ghana on Monday 9th September 2013 at the open-ing of a two-day Regional Conference on “Building Nation-al Peace Infrastructures: Strengthening National, Regional and Continental Coordination in Conflict Prevention.” Co-organized by the UNDP, the African Union Commis-sion (AUC) and ECOWAS in consultation with the Govern-ment of Ghana, the Accra meeting is a follow up to the June 2013 consultation in Addis Ababa by the UNDP, AU and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) on the en-hancement of RECs capacities for conflict prevention and mediation. President Ouedraogo, represented by the Commission-er for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Mrs. Salamatu Hussaini Suleiman, noted that while efforts accorded to peace and security by national and regional stakeholders, have succeeded in increasing the resilience of the region to wanton human rights abuses and violent conflicts, much more remains to be accomplished.” He said “the continuing disputes associated with elec-toral processes and the new forms of emerging threats call for a careful review of existing mechanisms,” adding that while “existing regional and national mechanisms tend to emphasize Track I conflict management methodologies,” greater focus should now be placed on local and alterna-tive dispute resolution. “Conflict management should be less compartmental-ized and show structural and organic links between the local, national and the regional efforts,” the ECOWAS chief added. He expressed the hope that through consultation, ECOWAS Member States should be exposed to the initia-tives, tools and opportunities available in constructing viable infrastructure for peace at the national, regional and continental levels. These should include modalities for exchanging best practices and opportunities to build na-tional peace and security architectures, where they do not exist, and to broaden and further strengthen existing in-frastructures There should also be “synergies and collaboration be-
tween national and regional infrastructures at the national level; modalities and roadmap for linking national conflict prevention, resolution and peace building initiatives to the regional and continental architectures; and development of a Plan of Action around concrete initiatives and activi-ties for cooperation between the Member States, ECOWAS and the AU on a mutually reinforcing and organic peace and security architecture.” In this regard, the President noted that a pilot study commissioned by the ECOWAS Early Warning Directorate on National Early Warning and Response Mechanisms has generated a draft Regional Policy Framework, which will be discussed with Member States, starting in October, 2013 at the expert level for eventual adoption by the re-gional Mediation and Security Council. Speaking in the same vein at the opening, Ghana’s President, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, noted that the “complex challenges emanating from the changing nature of violence can no longer be met with the old Law and order Concept.” While security forces could be deployed to enforce peace, “such peace is not sustainable so long as the root causes of the conflict are not addressed,” the President affirmed in the speech delivered by Mr. Hannah Tetteh, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration. As a solution, he suggested the Community Security and Social Cohesion approach, which seeks to “create platforms for various actors in conflict contexts to engage constructively and to help develop coherent interventions to enhance peace, security, development and cohesion at the community, regional and national levels, thereby building resilient societies with the capacity to promote tolerance and dialogue.” According to the Ghanaian leader, “the advantage of this approach is that it facilitates engagement on common analysis to understand the drivers of violence and insecu-rity and to develop effective response strategies based on the characteristics of the conflict.” The UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Rep-resentative in Ghana, Ms. Ruby Sandhu-Rojon, reiterated the UN system’s continued support to ECOWAS, AU and their Member States “to promote peace infrastructures in the region.” “Indeed, the United Nations,” she said: “has a duty to
help nations develop their own capacity to peacefully resolve their differences and disputes.” Ghana’s Interior Minis-ter Honourable Kwesi Ah-woi explained that “Constructive conflict management is as much a science as an art,” and that developing a national infrastructure for peace in every country’s context “offers national govern-ments the opportunity to acquire a transformative approach to conflict man-
agement and peace building, in a manner which resolves the issues and maintains or even strengthens relation-ships.” The chair of the opening ceremony Dr. Susubribi Krobea Asante, a member of Ghana’s Council of Chiefs and National Council of State, toed the same line in his speech in which he urged countries to be more proactive in peace building as this would help nip potential conflicts in the bud. The two-day meeting brought together key partners in the West African region to consult on how best to strength-en linkages between national, regional and continental ini-tiatives on conflict prevention and mediation. Participants included representatives from the AU, ECOWAS, Ministers of Interior or their representatives, as well as representa-tives of national peace infrastructures, and similar regional structures and representatives of UNDP Country.
EDUCATION AND PROSPERITY AS A PANACEA TO TERRORISM
T he ECOWAS Vice President, H.E. Dr. Toga Gayewea McIntosh has identified education and prosperity as a
panacea to terrorism. Receiving a delegation of the parliamentary affairs com-mittee of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on a fact-finding mission in his office, the vice president stressed the need for stakeholders to increase school enrolment in the region using it as a tool to address the issues of pov-erty, terrorism and instability in West African. “Education and prosperity will play a great role in down-playing terrorism,” the Vice President who received the del-egation on behalf of the President of the Commission, His Excellency Kadre Desire Ouedraogo said. He told them of plans by the Community to host a Com-mand Post Exercise for the ECOWAS Standby Force in Abuja in order to improve the capacity for the rapid devel-opment of the Force during future conflicts in the region. Dr. McIntosh said that this is within the framework of peace and security which is one of the preoccupations of the Community. In order to address the development challenges of the region, he said the Commission has been trying to promote peace and engage in conflict prevention in order to create an environment conducive for the pursuit of its primary responsibility of facilitating the socio economic develop-
ment of the region. Dr. McIntosh enu-merated some of the constraints of the Commission to in-clude the paucity of resources and the im-plementation of re-gional instruments. On Mali, the Dr. McIntosh informed the team that the circum-stances that triggered the Mali situation is so fluid that despite
the ECOWAS Early Warn-ing mechanism, the region did not anticipate the magnitude of subsequent challenges. He commended the intervention of the French government as well as the African Union (AU), for it’s key role in the Mali crisis and then expressed satis-faction with the role of ECOWAS, noting that the Community could do more with better support. He also told them that ECOWAS, with the sup-port of the European Un-ion, was constructing three Joint Border Posts that would contribute to improving the processing of goods and per-sons at the borders thereby addressing one of the key chal-lenges confronting the implementation of the regional Pro-tocol that liberalizes the intra community movement of goods and persons. Four others are in the pipeline all of which will contrib-ute to addressing the functional difficulties in inter-state travels and associated transiting hassles across the West-African sub-region. The team was led by Mr. Michael Grapes and accompa-nied by the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, His Exel-lency Andrew Pocock, both of which reiterated that the British government attaches a very high importance to ECOWAS and its development efforts which necessitated the mission in order to enable them produce a report on “Extremism and Political Instability in West Africa. The team wanted, among others, to get an insight into the ECOWAS performance and how it sees itself in the fu-ture, the role of drugs in extremism, border policing and the region’s conflict resolution mechanisms. They expressed delight at the progress which ECOWAS
has recorded in Mali and the opportunity for the British government to contribute to developing regional resilience in West Africa and the Sahelien countries and pledged the willingness of their government to continue to support
ECOWAS in its development efforts.
ECOWAS COUNCIL RECOMMENDS NEW
REGIONAL SINGLE CURRENCY ROAD MAP
T he just-ended 7th Ordinary Meeting of the ECOWAS Convergence Council held in Abidjan has recommend-
ed that a technical committee be set up to propose, before the end of the year, a new implementation time-table for
the Community’s Single Currency Road Map.
To this end, the Council urged the ECOWAS Commis-sion to establish and coordinate a working group compris-ing WAMA (the West African Monetary Agency) and WAMI (the West African Monetary Institute to finalize the draft
report on the review of the time-table for the pro-
posed common currency.
The Abidjan meeting of 6th September 2013, which focused on the “Status of Macro-economic Convergence in the ECOWAS region in 2012” was attended by the Vice-President of the Commission, Dr. Toga Gayewea McIntosh, Minis-ters of Finance and Gover-
nors of Central Banks of the fifteen (15) ECOWAS Member States, as well as the ECOWAS Commissioner for Macro-
economic Policy and a host of financial experts.
The nine items proposed for amendment in the time-table of the preliminary report of the ECOWAS Commission included postponing the effective establishment and func-tioning of the NCC (National Coordinating Committee to the Multilateral Surveillance Mechanism) and extending the harmonization of the regulatory and surveillance frame-work of banks and other financial institutions from 2013 to
2015.
Other items included the change of the deadline for the harmonization of regulations on current and capital ac-counts transactions within and outside the ECOWAS re-gion from 2013 to 2018, and extension of the deadline for harmonizing the establishment of the accounting and fi-
nancial reports for banks from 2013 to 2015.
Others were the extension of the timeline for the harmo-nization of monetary policy frameworks from 2013 to 2015, changing the proposed deadline from 2013 to 2015 for the harmonization of payments system infrastructure (wholesale and retail payments) for cross-border transac-tions in the ECOWAS region, and shifting of the proposed date from 2013 to 2015 for the completion of payment sys-tem infrastructure in the Gambia, Guinea, Liberia and Si-
erra Leone.
Lastly, the meeting proposed that stocks quotations and negotiations in ECOWAS national currencies, initially en-visaged in 2013 should now take place in 2014, while fi-nancial markets (capital funds, insurance funds, banking funds, pension funds, social security account, etc.) are to
be integrated in 2019.
A decision on the new calendar will be taken by the Committee of Governors of Central Banks of Community Member States during its next annual meeting scheduled
to be held in The Gambia.
The Abidjan Council meeting also recommended the establishment of a regional committee to reconcile the data on intra-Community trade and produce viable statistics on trade flows in the ECOWAS region. It equally recommend-ed the implementation of policies aimed at reducing vulner-
ability to shocks through the diversification of economies.
There were also recommendations on support for the production of viable statistics in Member States, promotion
of growth and job creation, domestic resource mobilization, efficient management of public expenditure, utilization of loans to finance as a matter of priority, productive invest-ment expenditure while ensuring debt viability, and lastly, measures to be taken by the ECOWAS Commission to facil-itate participation in the IMF and World Bank missions as
provided in Article 4 of the Fund’s Statutes.
The Council was notified of the on-going revision of the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Establishment, with the purpose of removing inade-quacies in the Protocol and introducing new provisions that
will reinforce the mobility of Community citizens.
Some of the proposed revisions include the withdrawal of the 90-day residence permits, introduction of biometric national identity card to replace the ECOWAS travel certifi-cate, creation of regional labour market so that national legislation reflects Community preference, and the estab-lishment of a regional forum on migration and develop-
ment.
ECOWAS MINISTERS ENDORSE REGULATIONS ON STATISTICS
E COWAS Ministers have endorsed eight Regulations for the implementation of
regional statistical frame-works and instruments geared towards the devel-opment and harmoniza-tion of statistics in the region. At a one-day meeting held in Abidjan on Friday, 13th September, 2013, the Ministers highlighted the crucial role of statistical regulations in shedding invaluable light on the
Court), Senator Ikweremadu, Mr. Ally Coulibaly (Ivorian Minister for Integration and
Ivorians in Diaspora) and Amb. Jonathan Coker, President’s Special Rep to Cote d’Ivoire
with some participants in a group picture
Dr. Ba, reading his welcome address
conduct of statistical data produc-tion and thereby resolved to work with the ECOWAS Commission towards the implementation of the frameworks and instruments. They urged Member States sta-tistical systems to embrace the regional implementation frame-works and instruments for the collection, compilation, updating and dissemination of data in order to meet the objectives and aspira-tions of Member States to move towards one community. The Ministers drawn from Member States Ministries of Plan-ning and Development pledged their support for the ECOWAS Commission’s quest to harmonize statistical information required for decision-making, policy formula-tion and regional integration. Consequently, they urged the Com-mission to envisage optimal approach for conducting statistical regulations implementation process. Additionally, the Ministers who are meeting for the first time, called for the establishment of an independent sta-tistical development fund to enhance the capacities of regional and national statistical systems to produce and dis-seminate quality statistics required to monitor the regional integration agen-da. In his opening speech, the Cote d’Ivoire Minister of State in the Minis-try of Planning and Development, Mr. Albert Toikeuse Mabri highlighted the need to maintain unity and solidarity within the region and consequently reaffirmed the Country’s commitment to the implementation of the Reference Regional Strategic Framework and the Strategy for Harmonization of statistics in Africa (SHaSA). He also stressed the importance of statistics and the need to harmonize methods and indicators within the re-gion in order to deepen regional inte-gration. In his opening remark, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Macro Economic Policy, Dr. Ibrahim Bocar Ba, said that the Ministers Meeting was part of the Commission’s efforts to mitigate the negative consequences of the absence of integrated statistics driven by the demands a result based agenda. The ECOWAS Director of Research and Statistics, Mr. Mahamadou Yaha-ya, whose department organized the meeting, explained that the adoption of
the documents is in readiness for their final adoption by ECOWAS Council of Ministers and the Conference of Heads of States during their end of year Sum-mit. The regulations endorsed by the ministers include those on the imple-mentation of RSP 2014-2018, the framework of reporting to the Council of Ministers, the implementation of the Regional Statistical Fund, the imple-mentation of the ECOBASE database, the Regional Economic Activities and Products Nomenclature, the Methodo-logical Guide for the harmonization of Consumer Price Index (CPI), the frame-work for harmonization of Balance of Payments statistics (BOP)and its action plan, the guide for indicators of the ECOWAS Agricultural Information(ECOAGRIS) System as well as the Re-gional Environment Statistics Pro-gramme. Other documents considered dur-ing the meeting which was preceded by a preparatory meeting of the Special-ized Technical Committee on Statistics Issues in the ECOWAS Region, held from 9th - 12th September 2013, in-clude the ECOWAS Regional Statistical Programme (RSP) 2014 – 2018, the operational mecha-nism for the statisti-cal fund, the frame-work for reporting to Council of Ministers as well as the ECO-WAS Statistical Da-tabase (ECOBASE).
The meeting was attended by rep-resentatives of all ECOWAS Member States, resource persons from the re-gion as well as regional organisations such as the West African Monetary Agency (WAMA), the West African Mon-etary Institute (WAMI), the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID), the African Development Bank (ADB), Economic and Statistical Obser-vatory of Sub-Saharan Africa (AFRISTAT) and the Economic Com-mission for Africa (ECA).
EDITORIAL TEAM Sunny Ugoh ** Ag. Director Communication Paul Ejime ** Editor Doscof Aho ** Internal Communication Officer Amamata Sulaiman ** Information Graphics Officer David Oduyingbo ** Photos Sani Malgwi ** Photos
Dr. Ba (4th left) and Mr. Mabri (5th left) in a group picture with some participants at the meeting
