ACCRA, (Reuters) – Organised crime in West Africa risks wiping out gains in a region once plagued with frequent coups and wars unless governments work together to tackle the threat, a top official of a regional grouping said yesterday.
West Africa is increasingly attracting investors in mining, oil and other sectors, but its countries need to “wake up from their denial stupor” to crack down on crime, said James Victor Gbeho, president of the ECOWAS Commission.
The area faces many new threats including the theft of oil, trafficking of drugs, weapons and people, as well as money-laundering and cyber crime, he told a conference.
Islamists in the Sahara have also earned millions of dollars from kidnap ransoms.
“The list is ever-increasing and I cannot overemphasise the importance and urgency of governments and institutions, both local and abroad, coming together sooner rather than later to fight this threat,” Gbeho told the conference in the Ghanaian capital Accra.
The week-long conference is hosted by ECOWAS and the U.S. government-funded Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
Gbeho said the pace of organised crime “threatens to wipe out all the political, social, economic and other gains achieved since the waves of reforms and renaissance gained currency in our region.”
Decade-long wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone are over. Mauritania has seen two coups in five years, but now has an elected government. Ivory Coast, Niger and Guinea, long plagued by political turmoil, are inching towards elections.
This relative stability has lured investors back into some nations, where iron ore and gold-mining projects have been re-launched. New oil finds have been made in the region and local debt and equity markets are seeing increased activity.
But the resource riches have the potential to worsen criminal activity, which in some cases involves top government officials, Mathurin Houngnikpo, a consultant for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies said.
“The criminals have managed to infiltrate the highest level possible of governments,” he said.
“If you look at most countries where they have oil, the reality is that instead of oil being a blessing it ends up to be a curse.”
He urged Ghana, due to become a commercial oil producer by the end of this year, to learn from the failures of other West African oil exporters.
International donors should help West Africa with logistics and intelligence to combat organised crime, he added.
“West African countries need to wake up from their denial stupor and accept the incontrovertible fact that organised crime goes where the environment is ridden with corruption, weak governance, pervasive poverty and the cherished attitude of the misguided citizen to get rich fast,” ECOWAS’s Gbeho said.
“Unless we upgrade our … strength, our region will be devastated by all the ill effects we have seen in other parts of the world,” he said.
