Will the three Sahel Countries, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger stay or stick to their guns to ditch the sub-regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) despite the goodwill shown by the Authority of Heads of States for the bloc to remain united?
This is what bothers the powers that be as the time draws closer since the three countries served notice of severing ties with ECOWAS.
Chairman of the Committee on Political Affairs, Peace, Security and African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) at ECOWAS, Senator Edwin Melvin Snowe Jr has said the whole situation “is an uphill battle, quite challenging, and some will say doubtful. But I’m an optimistic person, so I would like to keep hope alive, so we are keeping hope alive in the interest of our people or citizens of the Region”, he said in an interview.
Chairman Snowe Jr. further pointed out that their decision will not affect those in the upper bracket but affects those in the lower bracket. “Freely we visit each other without restrictions, but the Community will have to change a lot of those things where one will have to obtain visa and a lot of things for our citizens. The truth is that it is quite challenging. And we are very hopeful that at the last minute, there could be some divine intervention”.
In the wake of the stands taken by the three Sahel countries, should the democratic bar on good governance and democracy be lowered in the sub-region?, No, rather we should do better and we need to treat democracy in its true sense of the word and be a little more transparent in our dealings with our citizens, he added.
Furthermore, we are the custodians of the peace and implementation of constitutional order, so when we are given the national responsibility it is no longer about ourselves, its more about the people, so I think we need to do a little more better and more for our people than we have done in the past. And I think in the past we got reluctant, complacent and people take those things for granted.
“I just hope that, we are learning from the experience of the last few years from our region that we will take governance a little more seriously than we have done before, the issue of corruption, transparency inclusiveness and all those things. People must feel being part of the governance, people should feel included”.
If you run a system of government where people feel they are excluded despite being citizens of that country and are tax payers but they may not necessarily be part of the structure or party you treat them as less citizens, those are some of the things that have caused problems for us over the years and I think it is important we visit our style of good governance, he emphasised.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/Ghanamps.com
