Ghana’s President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has urged colleagues to find solutions to multiple coups in the west African region.
Justin Lane/Pool/AFP
- Ecowas has been urged to find solutions to the emerging remilitarisation of governance, and the attempted confiscation of democracy by elites.
- Ghana’s president has warned colleagues against pushing for extension of presidential terms as a factor encouraging coups.
- He has also called on Ecowas legislators to understand everything about coups if they are to stop them from spreading.
Not long ago, all 15 heads of state in the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) were democratically elected, but just four years later that has drastically changed.
Ecowas is made up of eight French-speaking, five English-speaking, and two Portuguese-speaking countries.
Problems in the past four years arose in French-speaking countries that had military coups; namely, Mali was suspended on 30 May 2021, after two military coups in a space of nine months; Guinea was suspended on 8 September 2021; and on 28 January 2022, Burkina Faso was suspended.
The last to be suspended was Niger in July this year.
Outside Ecowas, the only countries to have coups are Gabon and Sudan.
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On Friday last week, the second Ecowas Parliamentary Seminar was held in Winneba, Ghana.
In his address, Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo spoke about the new reality in which Ecowas found itself, which required immediate solutions.
He said:
We cannot run away from the fact that our region is confronted with a difficult economic, political, social, and security situation.
“As all of us know, despite the considerable progress made by the community in the areas of democracy, good governance, and the rule of law since the early 1990s, which meant that, four years ago, all 15 leaders of Ecowas states were democratically elected, we are, at the moment, witnessing a decline in our democratic credentials,” he said.
He spoke about the need to “find solutions to the emerging remilitarisation of governance, the attempted confiscation of democracy by elites, and the wanton desire to destroy democracy by terrorist groups and armed criminal gangs in the region”.
This was because coups were not going away, at least for now. Last week, the coup regime in Burkina Faso claimed to have thwarted a coup by some elements within the military.
Reports say by Saturday, four soldiers were arrested and two were on the run.
Akufo-Addo, in his address, blamed “the attempted confiscation of democracy by elites, who engage, through legal antics, in the manipulation of constitutional rules and the subjugation of the institutions of the Republic with the sole aim of remaining in power”.
His statement was similar to reasons given by General Mamadi Doumbouya of Guinea at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA78) in mid-September when he said coups occurred because rogue civilian leaders were abusing power and changing constitutional provisions without consulting the masses.
Akufo-Addo added that those kinds of leaders in the region, were creating fertile ground for “the emerging remilitarisation of governance with the intrusion, once again, of the military on the political scene, who have neither consulted, nor received any mandate from, the people on whose behalf they purport to act”.
He said he was hopeful that eventually, democracy would return to parts of the Ecowas because, over the years, history has proven that military rule at some point reaches a dead end.
“Modern history has taught us that tyranny, oppression, and totalitarian government do not last long. No matter how a people apparently reject democracy and civil liberty, circumstances would always force them back to embrace them,” he said.
Akufo-Addo told the parliamentarians that they had to invest more in understanding the root causes of coups and how to stop them from occurring.
“Help us understand even better the root causes of democratic regression and political instability in the region in order to better address them, and speak against the extension of presidential term limits by some leaders to strengthen their grip on power. These actions tend to result in discontent amongst the populace, which creates fertile grounds on which military interventions disingenuously feed,” he said.
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