Kofi Ampeah Woode
The Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) has commenced its African Security Dialogue Roundtable Meetings – a five-country initiative, to deliberate on issues pertaining to the security landscape of West Africa – and deepen the conversation on security issues that affect it and Africa as a whole.
The first in the series, in which the participants are expected to be forthright and forceful in their engagements to inspire policy-oriented recommendations to promote local, regional and global security reforms, commenced on Monday 6 February, 2023, at the KAIPTC, Teshie, Accra, Ghana, with the participation of His Excellencies (HE) former Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Ernest Bai Koroma of Nigeria and Sierra Leone, respectively.
The Commandant, KAIPTC – Major General (Maj Gen) Richard Addo Gyane provided the backdrop for the maiden roundtable banter, with statistics of the West African subregion, Africa and its implications for human security:
He said Africa’s population is projected to double to 2.5 billion within a generation; Nigeria’s population will also increase to over 400 million within same. Almost 60% of Africa’s population is under the age of 25, making her the youngest continent. The African median age was 19.8 in 2020, with Niger at just 15.1. By 2100, at current growth rate, Africa’s youth population will be double the entire population of Europe.
Sub-Saharan Africa has not kept pace with the volume of people entering its job market, he continued, investment and economic growth are low, reflecting poor governance and political instability. Africa’s share of global foreign direct investment (FDI) lingers around 3.5% of an annual amount of $1.5 trillion; yet its share of the global population is almost 17%. Developing Asia received, by comparison, $512 billion in 2018 FDI, nearly 40% of the total, closer to its global population share of 60%.
The complexity of the contemporary security environment—from cyberwarfare to the rise of authoritarianism, the threat of populism and domestic extremism, disintegration of regional alliances, trade wars, collapse of confidence in institutions and elections, and the disruptive impact of pandemics and ill-judged or ill-timed energy transitions, are all critical issues the continent has to urgently address, General Gyane stated.
The Commandant said the Roundtable also seeks to pinpoint the likely security challenges facing Africa over the next generation, how insiders and outsiders could best collaborate to ensure stability and how non-state actors could be managed within the current environment. He furthered that the discussions of this meeting, and the next four, will be part of a documentary and result in an open publication.
Taking his turn, HE President Obasanjo said the population statistics for the subregion of West Africa, such as in Nigeria, with a population of 225 million people – with 20 million of children of school-going age out of school, should be a wake-up call, for efforts to be made to make the population an asset and not a liability, to avert compounding insecurity in the future.
He suggested that a change could be made and population made an asset, if there is food and nutrition security, good education, opportunities for skills acquisition, and more attention given to science and technology, so not to repeat the past where there was no hope or any great expectation.
President Obasanjo additionally pinpointed what he labelled “African leaders’ mismanagement of diversity”, which he said is one major cause of insecurity that most of leaders have not given adequate attention to it.
He further called for more deeper understanding and measures of economic issues to avert insecurity and give hope to the population, and integration, at least, at the economic levels, if not at the political level, bilaterally and within regions, “so that we are not living in silos” he said,.
He finally called on civil society organizations to, in addition to being think-tanks, be ‘do-tanks’, and urged leaders in public service and private sectors to come together for security in West Africa and indeed in Africa, to deliver visible dividends of democracy.
President Ernest Koroma was heavy on translating all the thoughts, talks, research findings of solutions to African problems by academicians and experts into right decisions of real actions that are taken at the various leadership levels for the success of the people.
He raised the issue of integration, citing ravages by health destructs like EBOLA and COVID-19, to state that ‘nobody is an island’, and that the effects of the war in Ukraine on the global economy further confirms that, and wondered why countries are still holding close to issues of sovereignty rather than integration, to solve their problems.
“Moving forward, how do we also engage with the subregional bodies like ECOWAS and the AU to ensure that our structures in ECOWAS and AU, are such that we will be able to address the issues within the framework of sovereignty”, HE President Koroma posited.
On insecurity in West Africa, he recalled that few years back, the subregion was the darling of democracy, because much progress was made and issues of coup d’états were issues of the past. Suddenly, they are back, the military are in power and the security of the region is threatened, affecting all countries in the region, and limiting private sector interventions in economies.
On governance, HE Koroma called for the African Peer Review Mechanism to be strengthened “so that we will be able to speak truth to power”, to have clear mechanisms of implementation of recommendations, the review of statistics and the measurements of attainments or successes.
Professor Kwesi Aning – Director, Faculty of Academic Affairs and Research, KAIPTC said the West African demographic figures do not only speak about the numbers, but also the expanding urban spaces, poor law enforcement, rising crime, increasing violence, and the manipulation of the political class to use figures, poorly trained, poorly educated, unemployed and unemployable youth, for political ends.
The professor said there is a disconnect between the political and economic elite – in what they say and how they behave – and the hordes of people who are uneducated and unemployed, which makes extremists lurking in the subregion, sound rational and to give hope; because those who have appropriated the leadership of the state, have failed to deliver.
He said people are desperate and anyone who would offer them hope, like a drowning person, they will grab, thus, there needs to be a re-center of understanding and conversations about the agency of the people in whose name leaders speak, to engender a new narrative that gives hope predicated on trust, on self-respect and honesty.
Dr Greg Mills – Director, Brenthurst Foundation, partners of the Roundtable series, said the foundation is interested in partnerships that change business-government relationships, and are regional, continental and international in character, that bring people together in identifying commonalities.
He said Brenthurst was also interested in learning from the experiences of people who have attained high heights, and pursues partnerships between business, economy, security and politics and the strengths and integration of these activities into a much stronger whole.
Other dignitaries present at the discussion included Ghana’s National Security Advisor – Brigadier General Emmanuel Okyere, the Chief of the Defence Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces – Vice Admiral Seth Amoama, and some security experts.
By Kofi Ampeah-Woode
