The bill seeking to end tenure elongation has been proposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliamentarians to boost good governance and accountability in the region.
This was disclosed by the Chairman Committee on Political Affairs and security, Edwin Snowe Junior in a joint press briefing at the ongoing Delocalized Meeting of the joint Committee on Political Affairs, Peace, Security and Africa peer review mechanism (APRM), Legal Affairs and Human Rights / Social Affairs, Gender and Women Empowerment held in Banjul, Gambia.
Junior said tenure extension by greedy African leaders had posed a severe danger to the regional democracy, hence the need for its enactment to curb all forms of political instability.
“We are now discussing as we will be doing in this meeting the good governance bill encouraging countries or the president to desist from the third term because when you ambushed your constitution you gave the territory to ambush your tenure. So, if you have done one term and if the citizens say they are comfortable with you and you have done well then you can go and have a second term. But if most governments have done the second term they will say we want to make the constitution better for the people. So, they make it better for the people and go and change the constitution and by changing the constitution they say now is a new republic. So, now is a new republic so I can now go on a new trend for the new republic which is wrong. So, ECOWAS parliament has a reason why we have a gender committee because most of the conflicts our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters suffer the most.”
He noted that earlier, there was not much commitment in their deliberations have what is called the enhancement of power.
“Today, we can now provide oversight so we can go to any community institutions and provide oversight functions. We can go and monitor elections. We were just in Dakar to monitor the parliamentary elections.
“That is why we have different committees here that will play a very active role in a legal framework of what we do in our community. So, within the parliament, it has been very robust, especially for the past years.” Said, Snowe.
The lawmaker added that the reasons behind the military toppled in various ECOWAS regions is due to greediness by some political leaders, hence the narrative must change for the betterment of the citizens.
“On prevention of conflicts, there is no single solution to our problem . for example, we have two, three coup d’etat. In Guinea Conakry, you will agree with me that the president was seeking the third term from a constitution reform. There was a referendum, it was very unpopular and ECOWAS spoke against it, as a matter of fact, ECOWAS sent observers to guinea and they were rejected and they were sent back from the airport. So, the president went for a third term. So, based on the action of the president the military reacted. That was the cause of the coup d’etat in Guinea Conakry . in Burkina Faso, it was a different situation, it was said that the military said that the government was not doing much to fight the insurgency and everything turned upside down and the president gave much support to fight the rebel and then they took over so it was a different reason. The third one was in mali, they had a parliamentary election, they had a presidential election and the president won the election. and then the president try to make sure that his party got the majority in the parliamentary elections so he started tampering with the results and things got over the street and they moved to overthrow the government by the military. So, how do we as a people take ownership of our actions? when you get into the aircraft now to leave this country you are no longer representing your family, you are now representing your country and anything you do they will say ah he is a Gambian, this one he is a Togolese, oh this is a Liberian.
“So, the supplementary act of ECOWAS we must as a community be able to protect the interest of our community.”
The bill is coming at the verge of the empowerment of the ECOWAS Parliament to carry out oversight functions in rebranding the region for greater transparency.
