According to the Secretary General of the community Parliament, if ECOWAS is to have a standing army force to take care of security situation, it should be derived from the Act which should be revisited.
He further pointed out that as things stand now the establishment of ECOWAS is purely based on pure economic consideration.
“If things have changed and we have realized that this is the situation there is the need to look at the Act, since we have sovereign states belonging to community and to be able to address security situations we need to really put checks in place and discuss how to deal with things as a full bloc”
He made this remarks on Starrfm, a private radio station in Accra – Ghana when questioned on how ECOWAS can get full grips of security situation in the sub-region with the spate of terror attacks.
Mr. John Azumah recall that ECOWAS started as an economic state, the idea first was allowing people to move freely, trade freely to improve upon their lives.
“As we went along there were political considerations, we were becoming more important and influential to an extent if we did not have a good political system, the trade system will not look good that brought the political side of it”.
Again, internally we had military regimes that had to be converted to democracy and added that ECOWAS has moved from economic to the political platform which is now, very important to have because of growth.
Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/ghanamps.com