Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has
advocated the need for the Economic Community of West African States to
expedite action on the adoption of a unit of currency for the
sub-region.
He made this known on Monday at his
Presidential Hilltop residence in Abeokuta when the President of the
ECOWAS Commission, Mr. Marcel Allain de-Souza, paid him a courtesy
visit.
He said despite the fact that ECOWAS had agreed on this no effort had been made to make this become a reality.
He said, “We have decided that our unit of currency would be Eco. Let us now start using Eco, let Eco become our unit of currency.
“I will continue to make myself
available in the service of ECOWAS. Wherever you think my services will
be needed, call upon me, I am ready. What is important is that these
communities of 320 million people will be lifted up. These communities
should be marching along. We should get rid of internal conflicts.”
The former President recalled that 41
years ago when ECOWAS was established, the expectation of the founding
fathers, including himself, was high.
He, however, lamented that the
organisation had not moved as fast as it should in the area of economic
integration, but rather it had been bogged down by conflicts within the
constituent countries.
He said, “I think we will not be fair to
ourselves if we do not say to ourselves we have not moved as fast and
as far the expectation 41 years ago had been.
“But as you have rightly said, there
have been issues that have come up that were unexpected. I think again
we must tell ourselves the truth that there has not been enough
political will on our part to move that sub-regional organisation as
fast and as far as we should have done.
“We never expected that internal
conflicts will engage the attention of ECOWAS as much as it has engaged
our attention in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, in Cote
D’Ivoire just to mention a few.”
Obasanjo explained that many of the
conflicts which had broken out in this region were caused by the
leaders not paying adequate attention to issue of inclusiveness in the
course of administering the affairs of their countries.
“I want to say this that most of these
conflicts; most of these causes of insecurity or breach of security were
because adequate attention had not been paid to what I will call
inclusiveness.
“Inclusiveness in terms of political,
economic and social development of all our countries. Inclusiveness
gender wise, inclusiveness social wise, inclusiveness religious wise,
inclusiveness ethnic wise and we must appeal to our leaders in our
sub-region to take these issues of inclusion seriously.”
Obasanjo further noted that there should
be deeper economic reform regime within the ECOWAS Commission which
would enable member countries to move beyond movement of goods and
services.
The former President expressed his
concern over the legion of unemployed youths in the sub-region, arguing
that the whole African continent was sitting on a keg of gun powder for
as long as its leaders refused to pay adequate attention to providing
jobs for them.
He was also worried about the food crisis in West Africa, in which the region was finding it difficult to feed its people.
He said, “We now have a situation in
part of West Africa where people are now dying of starvation. Is it that
we are not producing enough food? Or if we are producing, what we
produced are evenly? It is shameful for whatever that has led us to be
begging international communities for supply of food to any part of West
Africa, it is not right.”
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