ECOWAS President says region winning war against maritime insecurity
Efforts of the war against piracy and other maritime crimes is yielding remarkable results, President of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) , Jean-Claude Brou, has said.
Brou said the evidence of the region’s victory against piracy and other robbery attacks at sea in the region was in Nigeria that has been removed from the piracy hotspot list.
He said that this was made possible by a number of strategies adopted to fight insecurity on the waters.
Delivering a paper at the ongoing 2022 First Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Parliament in Abuja, he said so far, the evidence could even be noticed by the fact that attacks in the Gulf of Guinea have reduced.
He said, “A year ago, I told you that the maritime insecurity in the Gulf of Guinea was extremely disturbing and globally we were the zone having the largest number of maritime piracy attacks.
“Actions have been carried by the countries individually but also at the level of regional coordination.
“We will continue to work at regional level with the inauguration of our Regional Coordination Centres for Maritime Security that has been set up in the various zones.”
He said all together they were working actively particularly in zone F in Cape Verde.
“Obviously, the fight against terrorism is a priority and it is being implemented.
“It comes to strengthen the various actions carried out in the various countries above all it comes to fight insecurity.
“We have the Accra initiative, the G5 initiative, and the Sahel initiative. The security situation as well as the food production crises creates an unprecedented humanitarian rises in the region.
“In 2021, the number of Internally Displaced Persons in the region went from 4.4 million to 5.5 million, so there is a large increase in the numbers of IDPs.
“So this shows the extent of the crises facing our region because of the double burden of security and food production.
“We continue to deploy our early warnings centers. Eight have been installed out of 15 and we hope to set up the remaining seven at the end of this year.”
