Five Years Of Combating Hard Crimes In ECOWAS States, What's The Scorecard? (1)

“The Accidental Ecowas & Au Citizen”: Five Years Of Combating Hard Crimes In ECOWAS States, What's The Scorecard? (1)

Writing in a week that will play host to no less than two important ECOWAS and AU meetings in Dakar and Addis respectively; and a meeting of researchers on ECOWAS integration in Cape Verde this whole week, presents a small problem for writers and observers of African integration. One could do the predictable thing by writing about the issues and themes emanating from the two meetings, or put a twist on them all. Today, I prefer to do the latter. Suffice-to-say, I would be found wanting for not offering an insight into the two major meetings mentioned above.

Over the past week, members of the Accra-based Economic Justice Network made a series of media interventions on the Economic Partnership Agreements. The idea was basically to ensure that the idea of sustaining the “no” on Ghana signing the EPAs was maintained. While it has been no blitzkrieg of information, the idea is that by making these interventions, much of the Ghanaian public will be adequately sensitized to the idea of the EPAs, and the dangers that lurk therein should Ghana sign. These activities all took place precisely because of the ECOWAS meeting that will be held in Dakar on 25 October.

Tipped as the meeting to discuss the “financial health” of the ECOWAS regional economy, it has a three-point agenda, which includes discussing the Economic Partnership Agreements; the operationalization of the Common External Tariff (CET), which has now been scheduled for 2015; and the future of the Community Integration Levy, which is the major source of financing for West Africa's institutions in ECOWAS. As I prepared to write this, I could not help but wonder whether the Community Integration Levy (which will go from 0.5% of exports to 1.0%) could be construed as the Ecowas Community Citizen's “tax” for the regional economy. (That discussion is for another day, clearly!) While global media outlets have claimed that this Dakar meeting will, rightly, discuss the future of Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; and Mali, I daresay the “financial health” will be of greater import to many citizens for now.

With respect to the Addis meeting, scheduled for 21-25 October, African policy-makers will be converging at the home of the AU for the 8th Conference of African Ministers of Trade(CaMoT). Beyond bring African Ministers on the thematic issue of trade together, the idea of the meeting is to consider and endorse the strategic framework for the implementation of the Action Plan for Boosting Intra-African Trade (BIAT); as well as the negotiating principles for the establishment of the Continental Free Trade Area(CFTA), which has been scheduled for 2017. Finally, the 8th Session of CaMoT is to iron out a common position on issues relating to the 9th WTO Ministerial Conference (Mc9) that will be held in Bali, Indonesia in November 2013.

So far so exciting.
Remembering 5 years of West African law enforcement

It would have been excellent to have been able to use this platform to announce that ECOWAS had, all along, a West African law enforcement mechanism in ECOWASPOL—pretty much like EUROPOL—that helps combat crime in the sub-region. Sadly, I cannot boast of any such feat: what I can do is to explain that the West African law enforcement mechanisms are manifold. There is no one coherent mechanism. It is for that reason I have embarked, off-late, on a tabulation and matrix of all systems relating to a kind of West African law enforcement.

Bottom line is that while Guinea-Conakry has an ORIC (Office de Renseignments d'Investigations Criminels), it seems to be the only country to have set up one in the sub-region. ECOWAS in 2002 proposed the Criminal Investigative Intelligence Bureau(CIIB), but never got round to ratifying it. Instead, a whole slew of donors, including the UN Office on Drugs and Crime(UNODC); the UN Office for West Africa(UNOWA); INTERPOL; and the European Union have waded into the helping cohere a semblance of West African law enforcement. ECOWAS' only redemption is in GIABA—the Dakar-based Intergovernmental Action Group Against Money-Laundering—that was established in 2000, and has earned itself an enviable reputation of effective and efficient reporting on Anti-Money Laundering measures within ECOWAS Member states, capacity-building for Financial Intelligence Units(FIUs) within the sub-region, and much more.

Few people may be aware that it was the vision of a Nigerian criminologist and a Senegalese lawyer that have taken GIABA to such commendable heights. Few people may even know that no less than Ghana will soon assume the Deputy-directorship of GIABA, which means Ghanaians must begin to get serious on monitoring what Ghana's high-level “ECOWAS man in Dakar” is able to do for the country, and the sub-region.

Without a shadow of a doubt, GIABA is an ECOWAS agency to emulate, and my current reading of the 10 years of operating in the sub-region is not to be sneezed at. One can only hope that they will begin to play more of a substantive role in the very necessary narrative of West Africa's law enforcement strategies in the near future. Over the next two weeks, this column will seek to shed light on 5 years of the ECOWAS Regional Action Plan against Drugs and Crime, which we have come to also know as the “Praia Plan.”

In 2009, in his capacity as a “Do More Talk Less Ambassador” of the 42nd Generation—an NGO that promotes and discusses Pan-Africanism--Emmanuel gave a series of lectures on the role of ECOWAS and the AU in facilitating a Pan-African identity. Emmanuel owns "Critiquing Regionalism" (http://critiquing-regionalism.org).

Established in 2004 as an initiative to respond to the dearth of knowledge on global regional integration initiatives worldwide, this non-profit blog features regional integration initiatives on MERCOSUR/EU/Africa/Asia and many others. You can reach him on [email protected] / Mobile: +233-268.687.653.

Source: Emmanuel K. Bensah Jr.