The President Good Leadership Advocacy for Africa, Dr. O’Diakpo Obire was a guest of the Speaker, ECOWAS Parliament, His Excellency, Rt. Hon. Dr. Sidie Mohamed Tunis in his office at the Republic of Sierra Leone 🇸🇱 Parliament.
Amongst others they discussed is, the need for the integration of African States as this will create the enabling environment for sustainable growth of the continent.
Dr. Obire urged the ECOWAS Parliament to take responsibility of ensuring peace, security and stability in member States of the West Africa sub-region, as peace and security are a sine quanon to sustainable development.
Obire submitted that in recent times, the subregion has suffered huge setback in development and economic stability due to rising security challenges.
He urged ECOWAS, through the Speaker, to liaise with sister parliaments like The Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) to tame the present security challenge in Cameroon and some of its other member States and the crisis in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, etc.
Dr. Obire stressed the need for making our internal political party democracy in Africa more credible, as this is a major problem affecting our democracy. Poor internal party democracy paves the way for the emergence of bad governments.
Knowing this fact, Dr. Obire suggested that a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for political parties in Africa should be put in place to ensure that the administration and management of political parties are standardized, including financial independence of political parties.
Furthermore, to make the electoral process more credible, Dr. Obire opined that all political parties should adopt direct primary elections to pick candidates for elections.
They also discussed accountability and transparency in governments activities across Africa. Dr. Obire observed that corruption indices do not tell a good story about leadership and governance in Africa
With plea bargain that is fast becoming the trend in Africa, politicians are further encouraged to loot and embezzle the common patrimony. This is reprehensible and thus unacceptable and should be discouraged! Those who do the crime should do the time.
The Speaker, His Excellency, Rt. Hon (Dr.) Sidie Mohamed Tunis commended GLAFA for thinking Africa first and working assiduously towards the emergence of credible, selfless and visionary leaders across the continent.
