The Savannah Center for Diplomacy, Democracy and Development (CDDD) has called for collaboration among ECOWAS member states to tackle the rising cases of insecurity in the sahel region.
Director, Diplomacy, Democracy and Development, Ambassador Felix Pwol while speaking at a stakeholders meeting in Abuja on Tuesday stated that the issue of insecurity is beyond national interest, hence, cooperation is key to nip the issues of insecurity in the sahel in the bud.
“We have seen the issues of security, there is need for collaboration, many terrorists causing mayhem are crossing borders, so we need to cooperate, play down national interest but work towards regional interest”.
Pwol explained that the stakeholders meeting aims at addressing the issue of insecurity in the region with new strategies and initiatives to achieve better results.
“They have met stakeholders with the NSAs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chief of Defense Staff but they want to have a perspective of Civil Society Organisations as you can see, Savannah Centre is anchoring this, they want to see what perspective do we have on how best to address issues of governance, security in the sahel”.
“ECOWAS is trying but they need to improve, recommendations will be made by experts then to the authority”
“Cooperation is very important regardless of national interest, we should know that the issue of insecurity is here, we need to cooperate not only at the national but at the regional level”. He added.
Expert for the high level independent panel on security and development in the sahel, Dr Issaka Souaré stated that the meeting with the civil societies and quizzing them about their assessment in appraising the security situation to prepare an objective, realistic and actionable report.
Souaré added that the expert aims at knowing why other recommendations were not implemented hence new recommendations would be formulated.
“We are not creating a new initiative, we are assessing existing initiative in order to come up with recommendations that will make this initiative actionable and implemented nationally and sub-nationally”.
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