Mahama urges African countries to build capacity for conflict prevention

President John Dramani Mahama has called on African countries to build their capacity in the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts to ensure lasting peace on the continent.

“What Africa requires is systemic thinking and systems planning to replace the current fragmentation in the areas of conflict prevention and peace-building,” he stated.

President Mahama made the call when he addressed the opening session of a meeting of representatives of member countries of the ECOWAS and the African Union Commission (AUC) in Accra yesterday.

During the two-day meeting, participants will engage in consultations on building a national peace infrastructure by strengthening national, regional and continental co-ordination in conflict prevention.

Participants include representatives of Interior ministries in the sub-region, representatives of national peace infrastructure, including Ghana’s National Peace Council (NPC), and representatives of UNDP country offices.

In a speech read on his behalf by Ms Hannah Tetteh, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, President Mahama noted that a major reason every new armed conflict seemed to spring a surprise on the various governments and the international community was “the lack of a systems approach to conflict prevention”.

He said the same reason accounted for why resources were stretched to the limit in meeting post-conflict reconstruction.

President Mahama said since the drivers of violence and insecurity were “various and complex”, they could no longer be met with the old concept of “law and order approach”.

He said the security could be deployed to enforce peace but pointed out that in such circumstances, the peace would not be sustainable as long as the root causes of the conflict were not addressed.

President Mahama expressed the commitment of the Ghana Government to address the teething challenges facing the NPC, so that it could play a more pivotal role in the country’s conflict prevention efforts.

It is expected that at the end of the two-day meeting, a framework for the development of a regional plan of action for the establishment and strengthening of the infrastructure for peace would have been developed and adopted on the blocks of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA)

The APSA was developed in 2002 to provide the continent with a policy and institutional framework for each country to institutionalise an infrastructure for peace.

The President of the ECOWAS Commission, Mr Kadre Desire Ouedraogo, announced that a draft regional policy framework developed after studies into the ECOWAS Early Warning and Response Mechanisms in Niger, Ghana and Nigeria would be discussed with member states at a meeting to be held next month.

By Naa Lamiley Bentil/Daily Graphic/Ghana

Writer’s email: naa.bentil@graphic.com.gh