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West Africa: Yar'Adua Alerts Region On Terrorism
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Leadership (Abuja)
6 May 2008
Posted to the web 6 May 2008
Iyobosa Uwugiaren
President Umaru Yar'Adua has challenged Heads of the Committee of Intelligence and Services of West Africa to map out strategies of checking the spread of divisive extremist ideologies, by elements and interests external to the region.
The President spoke yesterday through his deputy, Dr. Jonathan Goodluck while declaring open the conference in Abuja said as intelligence and security professionals, they must not lower their threshold of alertness, saying that "old threats abound, while new ones are continuously being spawned."
He urged the participants to find lasting solutions to problems of cross-border banditry, smuggling of arms and illicit drugs, human trafficking, illegal migration and terrorism.
The president challenged the conference to fashion out mechanism for quality control to ensure that policy makers in the respective member-states of ECOWAS were always presented with objective reality, to enable cogent management of security.
Yar'Adua observed that, while security might be a crucial catalyst in creating the peaceful environment required for every field of endeavour, they must recognise that the issues of security and development were closely inter-linked. "Obviously the negative social effects of under-development would continue to create circumstances that undermine the capacity of our respective governments to guarantee the protection of lives, investments, and development programmes," he said.
He stressed the need for global networking by intelligence and security services to tackle the rising wave of international terrorism and other asymmetric threats, saying, "no single country is either immune or capable of engaging these threats alone."
On security situation in the West African sub-region, the president expressed delight over the relatively stable security climate currently being experienced in the sub-region as against the past years of crises in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
"We are pleased to acknowledge the success of democratisation and post-conflict reconstruction efforts in these two sister nations," he said.
The president praised the people of Cote d'Ivoire and its leaders for rolling the country back from the brink, and fashioning a largely home-grown solution to their crisis.
He said that though, much still needed to be done, the Ivorian people and government could continue to count on the goodwill of Nigeria and other countries of the sub-region.
Responding, the CISSA regional vice president, Mohammed Mustapha, said that the conference was meant to initiate a regional roadmap capable of exploring member-states' respected intelligence and security expertise to save the sub-region from the vulnerability of insecurity.
According to him, "Realistically, this meeting is full of purpose that is germane to the enhancement of peace, stability and security of not only our individual countries and sub-region but the entire continent."
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Earlier, the director-general, National Intelligence Agency, Ambassador Emmanuel Imohe, pleaded for the need for a common vision on how CISSA could be made to work in consonance with the aspirations of other relevant international stakeholders. Imohe listed the stakeholders to include the Interpol and other regional and pan-continental bodies tasked with overseeing intelligence and security issues.
He lamented that the sub-region was beset by many security challenges, ranging from trans-border crimes to the more insidious ones, such as terrorism and the spread of extreme ideologies.
"The rise in asymmetric threat, our borders, the ability of non-state actors to operate seamlessly across national frontiers, greatly underscore the need for strong cooperation between our services," he stated.
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