 Thank you, the sender. Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to everyone in the room. It's my pleasure to welcome us all to this webinar, looking at democratic reversal and restoration in West Africa. Today we are privileged to have a very, very rich panel of experienced people, different minds from the spaces of governance, elections, human rights broadly. And it's an interesting lineup we have today. I'll very quickly do a quick introduction of our panelists so that I do this just all at once. We can just go straight into the program. This webinar looks at the West Africa region. Four or five years ago West Africa was actually highlighted as one of the beacons of democracy on the continent with very, very significant transitions recorded in countries like Nigeria, in Gambia. Quite a number of transitions that were regarded as significant looking at peaceful transitions in different countries. However, the events of the last two years have shown a quick trend of reversal. Question then is what exactly is happening to democratization in our region? The region now intergovernmental by the echoers is also one that is commended as one of the strongest on the continent. And West Africa also has very strong instruments guiding elections and democracy on the continent. In fact, the African Union Charter on Democracy and Governance is actually modeled after the echoers protocol. Question then is we do have the framework, we do have the institutions, what is going on? It's also interesting that the youthful population in the region would we look at this as a challenge to democratization in the region? There are comments ongoing about the fact that the new crop of voters we have are people that never lived through our days of military regime. And never saw the struggles that brought West Africa to the space it is now in its democratization trajectory. So are we saying we have a youthful population that does not appreciate democracy for what it is? These are some of the questions would explore today. We would also look at the expansion of social media, the digital information space where every single citizen is gradually becoming a journalist on their own. So freedom of information, access to information, online freedoms, what has this done to democracy as we know it on the continent? And are we coming to a space where we look at redefining democracy as we know it? How do we get our youthful population to get on board to be to be part of this journey back to restoring West Africa's democratic credentials? I'm pleased to be moderating this discussion and it's also interesting that it's also coming up just a day before the opening of the coffee and peace forum here in Accra. Where some of these discussions would also be taking up on a broader note, looking at 20 years of the signing of the ECHOAS protocol. So to proceed, we will have a keynote speech by Professor Adebayo Lukushi, who is a distinguished professor and head of the Center for Advanced Study of Democracy and Development at the VITS University of Governance. He is also my boss and he used to be the director for African or West Asia at International Idea, that's International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. He's got 35 years of experience in the areas of international relations, governance and human rights. And he sits on a number of think tanks and boards across the world, not just in Africa. These include the European Center for Development Policy Management, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, and many more. Prof, you're welcome. Prof, you're welcome. I would also, let me just do all the introductions. After Prof would have an intervention by Dr. Emmanuel Aquite, who is the founding executive director for the Institute for Democratic Governance, IDEC. He's a political scientist and he holds a PhD in comparative politics and international development from Stockholm University in Sweden. IDEC has been doing very leading important work in the area of governance, not just elections in West Africa, but very particularly in Ghana, and he would give us his thoughts on that. After Prof, we have Austin Omorubi Aigbi. Austin is a senior program officer at the Center for Democracy and Development, CDD West Africa, which is based in Abuja, Nigeria. And they work across West Africa. Austin is actually speaking to us from the Gambia where he's doing some work on fact checking and issues around fake news and disinformation. And he will be bringing some perspectives on the digital information space in this conversation. Certainly, not the last, not the least, we have Nana Fadzimou, who is the executive director for West Africa Civil Society Institute, Oaxi. She's worked within the civil society sector for 24 years and she's passionate. She's a passionate advocate for sustainable development in Africa. She's passionate for leading change and challenging the status quo on the continent. And very recently, she got the advanced media, she got onto the advanced media, the most influential African women's list. Nana, I want to be like you when I eventually grow up. But yeah, this is our panel for today and I can't wait for us to get into this discussion. This webinar is going on simultaneously with many other initiatives hosted by the democracy coalition. And we hope that some of the discussions here will come up with clear recommendations to be moved on to the the democracy summit being hosted by the US government over the next two days. So we would urge our speakers as well to also, you know, bring up clear recommendations that they would want us to take on to this global forum. With that said, Prof, I would like to welcome you for your keynote address. I'm muted. Your mic is muted. Okay. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for the kind welcome. And I would like to say a very good morning to all of the panelists. It's almost, it almost feels like a family reunion with all the panelists. My good friend and brother fellow traveler of many years. Iman well equity. Nana. Who started as a colleague and I can very probably call a sister. And Austin. I be with whom I was in a budget. It's it's it's we need to revisit this theory of the, the cyclical theory of elites. Together on the a few, a few days ago with Austin on a fairly similar subject. But I'm delighted to be here and thank you for the opportunity to share some opening talks on the theme. Of our conversation today. And I think you did set the stage. Very well. With the posters which you put on the table. If one were to look back some 30 years to the kinds of conversations which were having at the beginning of the 1990s. When actually West Africa was a region of our continent that flagged off what has been described as Africa's entry into the third wave of global democratization. With events that unfold in. And other cities and towns of the Republic. And that's so hundreds of thousands of citizens sustaining mass protests. Not simply about bread and butter matters, but for a wholesale revamp of a governance system. And therefore a new national. Research for the administration of public affairs and the commonwealth. It does feel that somehow we lost that momentum. And haunted by a fairly different specter. A specter of the code data. For example. Which we have seen. A margin in the West African sub region in Mali and Guinea. Sighting the two examples. But also just on the margins of West Africa. Of course we've also seen a return of the military to the center stage of power. In neighboring Chad. Which has very close interactions and connections with the West African sub region. This specter is probably the latest. What's by no means the only challenge to our effort at building democracy in the West Africa. That we have seen in recent years. And I'm very sure that we have. A panel will unpack all the different dimensions of those challenges. But I'll just again very quickly. For the purposes of the coherence of what I would be saying and maybe setting the stage. Point to the fact that we have seen perhaps more than ever before. And not on connected to the code data outcomes. That we have witnessed in recent times. We have seen increased contestations around the integrity of elections. And alongside it. Contestations over the Constitution. Particularly specific clauses of the Constitution. That broadly speaking. Have to do. With. The what one might call the. Institution of the presidency. Not just in terms of its powers. But also with regards to. 10 year. And 10 year limitation. And yet this was the sub region at the beginning of the 1990s. As you indicated. Moderator. That seems to be at the cutting edge. Of Africa's transition. To democratization. Against the backdrop of course one must say. Of a reputation. Which West Africa had built up in the course of the late 60s. Following the first coup data that took place in Togo. In 1960. To be followed. In quick succession by a number of other countries. Notably Nigeria and Ghana. West Africa built up a reputation. As one of the most unstable. Politically unstable regions. Of the African continent. And alongside that. Actually. In the past. And alongside that. Actually. Was labeled the coup data belt. Of the African continent. The late Antonica Green actually published. A book. Of the main coup speeches. That were made. In Nigeria and elsewhere in the course of the. 60s and 70s entitled. Stay by your radio. For that broadcast that would come from. Some military officer. Announcing. A new coup data. Coup data. Of course produced military authoritarian rule. But also. West Africa was not. Unfamiliar. With the phenomenon of. The fact or the jury single party rule. Which itself also. Was authoritarian by definition. And alongside authoritarianism. Or a plethora of problems. Of a social and economic nature. Which. Seemed. In the eyes of some commentators. To suggest. A crisis. Not just of governance. But what. Has been described as. A crisis of governability. And you might remember the. Artificial. You might remember the article. From the Atlantic Monthly. That made the waves in the 1990s. About a common anarchy. In. West African hinterland. Which. At once. Sounded like a tendentious. Analysis. At least for those who are in the frontline. Of the fight for. Democratic reform. At the time. In the West African subregion. Was. Would actually have sounded like a prescient analysis. The. Kinds of consequences. That the sub region was likely to harvest. From. Its crisis of governance and governability. So change when it came. In the beginning of the 1990s. And we would not have time to go into the. Details of what were the drivers of change. Except to note that it emerged within the context. Not only against the background. Not only of. Prolonged military. Single party authoritarian rule. But was also. Delfered within the context. Of economic and social crisis. Of the most severe kind. Witnessed in the period since independence. And generally encapsulated. Under the broad rubric. Of structural adjustment. That was foisted on the sub region. In the. Period from. The late 1970s. Into the 1990s. And change when it came. Against this background. And in this context. Was fairly rapid. Almost like a wave. That began from. And the demands which citizens made. For. A sovereign national conference. That would redefine the foundations. Of governance. In that country. To the various constitutional. Meetings that were to take place in other countries. And to produce. A sea change. At least the way we saw it at the time. A sea change. Of. Of transformation. Of the political theory. Single party rule dismantled military rule. Unbundled. Life presidencies. Discredited. Term limitations imposed. And the fluorescence of civil society. That inspired the establishment of the West Africa civil society. Institutes. On a scale which we hadn't seen. Certainly in the period. Since the imposition of single party and military. Electoral reforms on a massive scale. In terms. Particularly. Of ensuring the independence of the election management body. But also. The integrity. Of elections that would flow from that. Judicial sector reforms. May. Security sector reforms. A new. Error of media freedoms. Which again. Well you know you are talking to. About the generation of young people who may not remember. And I remember the. The struggles. Of. In the late. Stages of the military regime of Jerry Rollins. To open up the media space. And how we all celebrated. The emergence of joy FM. Very restricted to playing. Sweet music. And entertainment initially. But with the journalists very gradually. Creeping into. The terrain of social. And eventually political. And. By the time Rollins became himself. Transform from a. Military ruler to an elected president. The media space in Ghana. And exploded. Exponentially. To what it is today. So media freedoms. Of the kinds. Which we all were able to celebrate. Alongside. With. Civil liberties. Of various kinds. And one can go on endlessly. With the list of the kinds of changes. Which we saw and the possibilities which. Is offered. And yet. It seems that it did not take really. Too long. For us to begin to ask questions about. Why we on the right path. Was this the best way by which we could. Achieve the goals of democratization. And. On the continent. Where the. Institutions and processes. Of democratization. That came into existence. In the sub region. The right kinds of institutions. That we should be looking at them. Austin. In. In the Gambia. In various capacities. And. The marbles system. Which has been used. As opposed to the ballot paper. For the casting of the vote. And that has elicited exactly the same. Kinds of questions. Which I am putting forward here. Did we. Choose a path of electoral pluralism. That simply. That. Is. A path of electoral pluralism. That simply. Reproduced. Parts that had been beaten by. Other countries. Particularly the western countries. And did we invest ourselves. Insufficiently. In creating institutional arrangements. And mechanisms. That spoke to our history. To our context. And to what would be workable. For us. To. Discussions around these issues in West Africa. Partly centered around the cost. Of elections. And I recall that in the context of that discussion. When you look at the budget. That was needed by election management bodies. And the kinds of. Wrestling contests. Which the likes of. Affari John. In the Ghana election commission. Down to. His colleagues. In the Nigeria election commission. It was always a contestation. I'm trying to find enough resources. To be able to. Organize elections. Along the. Patterns of plural pluralism. That we had adopted. Of course at that point in time. Many of us responded. And I think perhaps not without justification. To the. Politicians and others who criticized. The high cost. Of elections just. What it cost an election management body. To put in place. An electoral process by saying that. The money spent. On. A democratic process. Is never too much. Given the value the intrinsic value. Of. Of democracy. Is very good. To the discussions around. Education. How much does illiteracy cost. And in this case. How much does authoritarianism cost. In comparison. What we would spend. On electoral process. However I think. The discussions. Were also very quickly. Shifted. To other concerns. The early gains. Of. Of our. Democratic transition in the West African sub region. Have lingered and become. In a certain sense the heart of the matter. And I would like to dwell on these. So in many countries of the sub region. In addition to all of the gains that I have outlined. We have seen an alternation of power. In several countries. Right. Then a republic. Senegal. And so on and so forth. In which incumbents even. One of the most complicated and latest entrants. Last entrance. To the democratic transition process like Nigeria. Also saw an alternation of power for the first time in its history. Not only. Civilian to civilian transition. Taking place in Nigeria. Which Ghana had. Achieved earlier on. But also an alternation from a ruling party. To an opposition party. An opposition party winning an election. It was all a test. In the Nigerian context and similar tests. Were recorded. In terms of alternation. Sorry to rush you. Sorry I was saying sorry to rush you on. But we just need to. Yeah. I'm moving towards the end of my. Of my introductory comments. So. All of those alternations that. All of those. Significant changes and achievements. Began to pale into insignificance. In the context of what seems to be. A choicelessness. In. West Africa's democratic process. And I explained that choicelessness. In a sinful form. By saying that it did not really seem to matter. It doesn't seem to matter too much anymore. Who you vote into office. The basic economic and social policies. Simply remain unchanged. Which effectively means. That democracy in the sub region. To use the popular parlance. Is failing in some respects. To deliver social and economic dividends. To the citizens. Dividends which could have been at the heart. Of what one might call a new deal. For the West African sub region. A new social bargain. Or social contract. Between state and society. On the basis of which. The defense of democracy. Will not simply be. On account of adherence to an abstract ideal. But actually a concrete everyday experience. With people. Enjoy. And which makes it possible. For active citizenship. To be a natural part. Of the democratic experience. Rather than. A withdrawal from the political space. I think worse than that also. Or at least certainly compounding that situation. Is the fact that. We have also seen. In the context of. The collapse. Despite democratization of the social state. We have also seen. A weakened state capacity. That. Is underpinned. By. The prolonged fiscal crisis of the state. But also a crisis of political legitimacy. And that legitimacy. Making it harder for the state in West Africa. To take citizen consent for granted. And we've seen a breakdown of state authority. In many Sahelian countries. Of a kind which actually threatens to. Envelope the entire West African sub region. With new. Centers of power. Non state centers of power. That. That that that comprise in some cases. Extremist groups. From Al-Qaeda in demarcate to Boko Haram. That are proposing an alternative vision. To a teaming population. Of dispossessed and disempowered. Citizens. And simultaneously. Carrying out experimentations in the. Alternative administration. So that when you read a story. For example. That farming communities. In Northwestern Nigeria. Collected in excess of 60 million. Which is. Maybe just over a million dollars. To pay to bandits. In order to allow them. To. Plant their crops. And harvest their crops in peace. You know. You begin to see the extent to which. The erosion of state authority and power. Has taken place. And I think this sets the stage for us. To begin. Perhaps to put mines together across the sub region. As much on the basis of. Individual country experiences. But I would argue. Even more importantly on the basis. Of a West Africa wide. Comparative experience. On how we must. Save democracy. And the gains that were made at the point in time. With the view. To. Ensuring that we can make it as relevant. And many. For the citizens of the sub region. As possible. I'll leave it at that. And note that the. Panelists. Leaders of institutions. And. That work not just on a national scale. But in. On a pan West African scale. And maybe there is a possibility. Coming out of this. Webinar. For us also to see ways in which. A heightened. Enhanced collaboration. On the West African scale. Can enable us to begin to reimagine. Governance. And reimagine democracy. With a view to. Achieve in the transformation. That has eluded us to date. Thank you very much. Thank you very very much. I think you did a great job of. Tracing the trajectory of. West Africa's. Journey into democratization. And what I find interesting. Is the point. We are at the moment where. Elections are no longer the. We no longer ask questions. Whether. Countries would hold elections. But the question is what is democracy. Delivering. To the everyday person. Is it just an ideal we hold in our heads. And how can we. Now move beyond electoral democracy. In the region. I think those are some very very. Clear thoughts. And you also give. Proposals on CSO collaboration. In the region. I would like to also hear what the. Panelists have to say about this. Creation of alternative. Spaces of governance. And service delivery. Being. Through the activities of. Of. The extremist groups. That are popping up across the region. It would be interesting to hear their views. As well as. Well on that. I would give the floor now. To Dr. Manuela. Just before him. I would like to remind. Participants. That there is a Q&A function. Where you can. Type in. Questions. For the participants. On the. Bottom right of the screen you would see. A thing that looks like a question mark. Or you think that is clearly written Q&A. And you can post your questions and comments. In there. Dr. You have the floor for the next 10 minutes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the brilliant. What I consider to have done justice to my topic. So I don't have to speak much. The trajectory of democratic development. I think. My brother. Bio has done justice to that. In my 10 minutes. I just want to share. What I consider to be. Yes, there are threats to democracy. Multi-party democracy. And I think I like has to be talking a little more about. Multi-party democracy. And ask ourselves. Can it survive in our environment. And can it be transformed into. A developmental democracy. Or a developmental parties. And I've raised this. A couple of times because. I think. If you look at. Voting trends. In the last party years. 30 years, sorry. Which gives a cause for celebration that we've had. Democratic stability. Multi-party democracy stability. For close to 30 years. And I think that's a significant thing. The alternation with American. And I think that's a significant thing. The alternation with a military. Somehow has been controlled. It's resedging. It appears to be resedging. But generally. West Africans, I believe. If you look at the voting trends. The youth barge. It also makes them. Majority electorate. But they've been voting for parties. They are not getting the development dividends yet. But there appears to be. A stability. Of multi-party democracy. Of course, one would say that. If you look at the events in Guinea. And Chad. And probably at one time. And Mali. There is this fear that. Hey, are we going back to military. Rule. And as bio pointed out. The majority of our voters today. Have not lived under military rule. They don't even know what it is. So you will find some people celebrating. Me and say, well, if they are not doing well. And we get some young person like. He could come and fix things for us. But I think what we need to confront. Really is. How do we make multi-party democracy work for us. And. From where I said. It's not a matter of redefining democracy. As a new generation emerges. The new generation actually. The likes multi-party democracy. By the voting. Record. That has shown consistently that the youth. Really vote. Presidential parliamentary elections. But they are not getting the development dividends. And so recently you'll find that. Youth movements in countries like Ghana. In Ghana we have fixed it. Fix the country. Which is calling for a new constitution. But it hasn't. Interpreted the call for a new constitution. To mean military comeback. Because the military usually doesn't. And the constitution. So they are looking at ways in which. The constitutions. Would would would create the framework. For them to achieve development. And I think it is an important. Point we must. Take note of. Because. They are not giving up. On their rights. This is the most educated youth. We've had in Africa. Relatively speaking compared to the 50s and 60s. And 70s. They are equipped. With digital tools and technology. They are global and cosmopolitan. And so it's unthinkable. That they would want to see. Their rights and freedoms. To military. That should come in and say. Sleep at six o'clock and so on. I think they might be finding other ways. Of communicating with the world. And telling them what has happened. So it's no longer the one station. One radio station broadcast. And so. Potentially and inherently. I think they are formidable force for democracy. If. The quest they stand for. Can be answered. They want development. They want political parties. That would. Create jobs. Would build the economy. Will solve create more hospitals. Social and inclusive development. When you listen to them. That's what they are talking about. They are saying. They are talking about people. That can be done. They go in an omnibus way. And say. Let's change the constitution. And so on. And where I come from. It's a very simple. I think. In the last 30 years. We've had democratic stability. But it's a democracy. That probably has enriched a few. It's a democracy. Claude Ake had warned that the third wave of democratization in Africa that we saw from the beginning of the 90s was going to be about the empowerment of the African people. They are not going to get the development they need or the credit, but few people are going to enrich themselves. And so the rule of law has become an issue where we do not know who finances our elections. People who say they belong to parties do not pay dues to the parties and dues and subscriptions. And we also know that there is a notion of monetization and elections are getting more violent in many ways and so on, but it's not solving the problem of youth employment. It is not improving the quality of life of people. And so I think we must accept that we made some progress, multi-party democracy, but how do we make it a West African multi-party democracy? When we get there, I think for me the important thing we should focus on now is how do we shift our parties from this unregulated politics, elections cost money, and you must do everything to win. And after the elections, you don't deliver what you promised, but people enrich themselves. Where do we start from? My position is clear. I think that it is time for us to understand that political parties whom we vote for are agents. They at the same time, they can be the agents of the state, but they are not the state. And the weakness in the design of our democratic systems in West Africa, and particularly focus on Ghana, is that we did not create, in fact, by all mentioning it, it says the insufficient creation of institutions that would govern parties. Democracy, the only thing we've had is electoral commissions. And he mentioned electoral commissions a couple of times. But why should parties be beyond regulation? They are to declare, they are such they don't those who are elected. They are doing things interfering with public service institutions, changing people left and right, politicizing them. We only speak, but we do not say because of this, we have to do that. And when you move away from the politicization of the state institutions that are to be not party controlled necessarily, but to serve the development needs, and that the leadership of those will be mandated, you also are confronted with a serious problem that the behavior is just beyond the rule of law. Nobody calls them to order. And there is no particular institution that they go. We feel strongly that if we are listening to the youth, they want democracy where they are calling and drawing attention to the fact that the political parties should not be above the state. The political parties should come under the rule of law. But the rule of law that political parties need cannot just be the electoral commission, because the electoral commission is very restricted on its mandate. And in our context too, we have other objectives. If you take a number of constitutions, for instance, the Ghana constitution, one of the objectives that the state wants is a cohesive nation. So there's no, there should not be discrimination. It's an article in our constitution in Ghana. No discrimination on the basis of anything, not whether you're a woman, you're Muslim, you're Christian, you are what and what ethnic and so on. But this is what the parties do. And indeed in Ghana, there's some disaffection towards parties because they seem to be polarizing instead of building the cohesion. I think the point I want to make here is this, cohesion is a function of the state. The constitution embodies the state. And so if we want cohesion, we should not just look at parties who must necessarily contest for power and exploit diversity. When you're competing, you don't tell the electorate that your opponent is your brother and you all share the same things as, no, you have to show difference. But you need institutions of state to promote cohesion. That is why a national development plan, that is why certain institutions have been set up, for instance, in Kenya, despite their ethnic, the depth of their ethnic distress, have institutions that will look at national cohesion. So that when parties are going beyond the mandate that they are given, or they are contesting in a way that undermines the constitutional preference, that we are all citizens who must be treated equally. And they are not looking at whether you are Kikuyu, you are Yoruba, Omega, you are Fanti or whatever. That is what they must be kept on track to do. So where we have reached, one of the things we are advocating is that it is time to reform the party framework and maybe bring in defined institutions of state that will control the parties. The parties have become dual police like in Nigeria. You have the two parties, alternating party, power, just in Ghana and so on. But dual police in the economy are controlled, are regulated. In fact, when certain institutions of state find their behavior to be dangerous and upsetting the stability of the economy, whether it is the financial sector or the fiscal policies and so on, they step in. We have seen how the telephonies, the companies that we used to have, were broken up and open space was open for mobile telephony and many came different firms have come in and they are competing MTN in Nigeria, AirTel and so on. I see the advice here in Ghana, of course, AirTel is not here. But why can't we do it in the political arena? So the point is that it is time for us to see how to re-engineer the political arena such that political parties would come under some form of state regulation. For example, one of the institutions we are putting forward is that why don't we create what we call a multi-party democracy commission? Because election is not just what democracy does. Elections is fine, we have electoral commission, but electoral commission cannot extend its remit. So when the political parties are, for example, engaging in ways that exploit our diversity and divides us, or they are mobilizing resources, they are spending so much money on elections that nobody knows the money is where they are coming from and they don't account for them. When they are behaving to polarize, they are not agreeing to anything but extremes. Who calls them to order? Who convinces them for a conversation and say, hey, you are violating the core values of the state and for that you are cautioned or you are warned or whatever. So there is an institutional deficit, a deficit of institutions that would govern political parties and the governance of political parties is what I am putting on the table. That you need to set up certain institutions just like we do in the economy and other sectors to govern political parties because they are agents of the state. They are not the state. They are giving a mandate to exercise on behalf of what we call the state. They cannot be above the rule of law. So the corruption, the violence being said are things that ought to be taken into account for. Where are those institutions? It's not just 10 limit or extension of tenure that must preoccupy us. It is also the governance of multi-party political parties and our multi-party system so that we can move from this election centricity to now look at development but the state, they have to operate within the laws of the state and also be held to account. You want to stop me so I'll stop myself but I'll come back. Thank you. Thank you, doc. Thank you very much. We'll still have time to interrogate some of these issues because I hear you well. You've spoken about the issue of moving from elections to actual development and also looking at national cohesion. It's quite interesting that you put this at the, well that you put political parties at the centre of this and I would actually like to hear the thoughts of other panellists on this when we get to the discussions. But please, just a reminder of the Q&A function on the bottom right side of your screen. There's a little question mark. That's the Q&A function where you can type in a question or a comment to the panellists. And for those watching us on the social media platforms, you can also send in your comments and my colleagues will pass this on to the panellists. I'll bring on now Nanna Afaginou who will be speaking on the issue of reclaiming the shrinking democratic space in West Africa. Nanna, you have the floor for another 10 minutes. Thank you. Elisenda needs to put on your presentation I guess. Good. Thank you very much Funto and for the opportunity to share my thoughts on this. Well, I'm supposed to speak particularly looking at the issues related to civic space and how much the retrogression that we are seeing in the democratic space is also affecting civic engagement and constraining our civic space. And I want to share this first start with it's a global issue. It's not only a West African issue and actually if you look at the civic space monitor which you can find online, globally looking from 2019 to 2020, what we have is now 43.4% having been in repressed civic space and living in countries where you have abstracted civic space. That if you look at West Africa, this is West Africa. When you look at West Africa you would see that you have an abstraction of civic space jumping from 15.8% to 18.3%. So we do have challenging issues worldwide and in West Africa it is a problem as well. When you talk about civic space, what are you dealing with? We are looking at particularly the oppression of civic engagement, constraining civic engagement and challenging issues where civil society cannot engage in governance, particularly when you look at issues around freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of association. And coming closer to West Africa, I want to look at the next slide and look at some of the countries that have been affected. If you look at the next slide you will see that Côte d'Ivoire has moved from abstracted to repressed. Guinea has moved from abstracted to repressed. Niger and Togo and you are looking at all of these things from 2019 to 2020. Another challenging area is that COVID has affected and the way citizen engagement has also been addressed in our region. And if you look at the people, power and attack reports from civic us, you see that repressive governments have used the pandemic as an opportunity to introduce or implement additional restrictions on civic freedoms. And there are examples in a number of our countries where you have a heavy handedness of security forces in the bid to enforce COVID restrictions have prevented citizens from expressing their views sometimes from demonstrating on key issues. Yes, the public health issues are important, but there have been times where government has overreached. And I want to say that this is the current situation that we are facing. But as we've heard from previous speakers, this wasn't the case. If you talk about what has happened from the 1990s and I call it the Benin, what happened in Benin, Kutunu in 1989, the protests that led to the sovereign national conference, what I call it the reawakening at that time for West Africa, and the changes that came from then on. I was listening to Dr. Ibn Chamba speaking recently, and he was talking about how when he started, you know, at the commission, heading the commission at Ekoas and starting in the late 1990s, all the heads, many of the heads of states were actually military, many of them, few of them were democratically elected. By the time he ended in the 2000s, all of them were having democratically elected and you had democracies in all the different West African countries. So there was, and we've talked about them, how much West Africa was an example, you know, across the globe, not only in Africa. So civil society at that time, and I liked the word that Prof. Adebayo Lukoshi used, the fluorescence of civil society. There were a number of things that civil society contributed to, they advocated for reform in many ways in different sectors. Legal, I mean law reform, policy reform. You saw changes happening, and I mean, you can talk about women's rights, we haven't mentioned that, but that was definitely one area where you saw a lot of legal reform happening, you know, and changes and in a number of areas, you saw this kind of reform or caring. Civil society was holding governments accountable. You had a push for transparency and accountability in governments, looking at issues related to anti-corruption. And you can talk about some of the initiatives that occurred with the push from civil society like the EITI, for example, when you were looking at accounting for our natural resources. Civil society were complimenting government public service delivery and doing a very good job in health, in education, in different sectors. Wash, water, sanitation and hygiene. A lot of work has been done by civil society. They were supporting democratic processes. And a lot of the things that Dr. Emanu Laquiti and then Prof. Lukoshi have talked about, looking at elections, the electoral processes, looking at different areas of our governance. Civil society organizations have supported a lot. Enhancing citizens' awareness and engagement in governance processes has been one of the things that they've also done. And also the involvement in promoting regional peace and security. But what has happened, because even though we continue to do this, the freedom, we talked about how that had developed, that the space had opened for civil society to participate freely in governance in many of our countries. And media, to some extent, is also part of civil society. How much that space had opened. Now that space, we have a major constraining of that space. And you see a lot of protestation. I mean, the state civil society relationship has become strained. And there are many reasons for that, which I would come to. And these pictures show the ensars in Nigeria, some of the social movements that have arisen. Ensars fixed the country in Ghana. You can talk about some of the movements in Mali, for example, of people protesting against the government and even wanting the government out of office and pushing for that to happen. And so there's been a lot of change there. This, you could say, was freedom. To some extent, you know, that we can go and protest, but there have been repercussions and the state repression of dissenting voices. And I want to show this chart that's from Oneep, the Oneep News that talks about the kind of protests and demonstrations we've had in West Africa from 2018 to 2021. From January 2018 to September 2021, 3,078 governance-related protests have been recorded and demonstrations. And out of this, you've had 756 fatalities and 4,276 injuries. You've had protests in Nigeria, in Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Mali. These were the predominant ones, Gambia, Liberia. But in Ghana, I've also talked about some of the protests that have occurred. And you have to- Sorry, Nanna, I think your slides need to move forward, I think by two or three, at least if the slides could be moved on, because I think you're already liking two more slides ahead. Sorry, go ahead. So yeah, this is- I was talking about the state repression of dissenting voices. You know, unlawful arrests of political opponents and who have been critical of regimes, heavy-handedness when it comes to protesters, the way protesters have been treated and how their civil liberties violated. And there have been a number of triggers and enablers of what has happened. And some of them have been mentioned already. The exclusionary politics and elections and some of the controversial constitutional reforms and amendments that we have seen in a number of countries have led to this. The executive continues to exercise excessive power in a number of our countries where you really don't have a separation of powers. And even when you do, the executive has so much power and is able to then use that power against the people and to change things in their favor. Parliaments have increasingly become a rubber stump for the executive. And there's been an increased rejection of electoral debates by opposition parties for alleged irregularities. And there are different examples for that. Weak judicial systems and processes where you've also had delays in deadlines of electoral disputes. And this has fed into a waning of trust in the judiciary. There's been an increasing state and resource captured by a political elite. We have the disturbing return of coup d'etats in West Africa. And quite worrying, the increasing popular support witnessed in Mali and Guinea. And I've talked about the strange state-citizen relationship that is also getting more and more serious. You have increasing state repression of dissenting voices and increased militarization of politics. And so we've been using the elections as an example. Very quickly, you see how security forces, particularly the military, are called into quell, political, any kind of disorder that seems to be arising. And what has happened in, as a result of that, increasing restrictions of the virtual space for civic organizing. And we have seen in a number of our countries how the internet has been shut down. Recently, in Nigeria, Twitter was blocked. You have had similar examples in Guinea as well. Anti-terrorism and cybersecurity legislation and civic space shrinking. And you have weak democratic structures. I've already talked about that. And then COVID and the overreach of government. These are some of the areas that have been rather concerning. And the top 10 violations to civic freedoms have been that protesters have been detained. There's been harassment. There's censorship. There's intimidation. There's an attack on journalists. And that has, there's a whole list, many examples of this happening in our countries. There's protest disruption and restrictive laws to disable organizations or civil society or citizens from exercising their civic rights and democratic rights, especially to protest. Journalists detained and excessive use of force and human rights defenders also detained. And what would I say should be some of the things that we should be looking at to kind of roll back what is happening now? I would like to make a few suggestions and some have been touched upon already. One of the key things I believe is solidarity. And I think that over the years, civil society and the collaboration across the region within countries has weakened considerably. Particularly in the 2000s, there are several examples of how civil society non-governmental organizations, as well as individuals and even others, other citizens who were interested in democratic consolidation, came together to work together to address many of the challenges that we're facing and to push for the kind of reforms and make the kind of contributions that I spoke about earlier. So that is missing and we need to ask ourselves why that is a problem and try and go back to that. I'm using this bird, this example image of a bird, because it's a Dinkras symbol, which is one of the symbols that the Akans use, that gives messages. And the message here is Sankofa. Sankofa, the bird here has its feet pointing forward and going back to take an egg, looking back to take an egg from its back. The message is that you can go back to take something that is precious and move forward with it. We need to go back to what it was that enabled us to work so closely together to be able to push for the changes that occurred. And I think that is important. The solidarity, building and collaboration has been, it's very weak and we need to address that. More citizen engagement, I think as the years have rolled by, one of the things is that you find that there seems to be a certain gap sometimes between particularly NGOs, if you are working at a national level, and citizens. And even though I would say that even with the social movements that we've seen, you have seen a certain coming together at various levels. I think we need to be having a lot more of that. And even within civil society, whether it's NGOs, whether it's professional groups, whether it's individuals using their mobile phones, activists, individual activists, let's find ways to build linkages and be able to work together, engage citizens, the ordinary citizens. I like the points that was made about making democracy contextual, bringing it down to the everyday experience of their citizen. Civil society is the citizen. So we need to be able to bring that message down and have that strong citizen engagement. And I believe that we can address some of these things. If the people are together and the people push, I believe that our government will be forced to listen because the people put them there. And that people's power is one of the things that we must reclaim. We need to mobilize. We need to mobilize. I like what one of the late activists used to say, talk about us organizing instead of agonizing. We need to organize. And that takes some willingness to come together. It takes some willingness to work together and be able to bring about that change that I think is important. And I would say that we need to take advantage a lot more of technology. We are in the fourth industrial revolution. Many, it's already, there's a lot that is already going on on social media, a lot that is already going on using technology. And when I say technology, I know that many of our people do not have, may not have internet connection, but many of us have mobile phones. In fact, in a number of our countries, mobile phone technology is over 100% penetration. So we need to take advantage of the tools that we have now to mobilize. And we need to have sustained advocacy. A lot of the social movements, we do push for changes to happen, but then we, because we, in a sense, it's about the issue at hand. And as soon as that is done, we kind of leave things as they are. Structures are not put in place to sustain the gains that have been made. So how can social movements, for example, work with institutions that are already existing, some of them being NGOs, to be able to sustain the gains that are made from pushing for change that happens when you do have social movements pushing forward. So there needs to be a lot more collaboration also at that level. And there needs to be support for civil society, support for citizen engagement. And when I talk about support, I'm talking about local support, I'm talking about international support. Internationally, the support that we've had for social justice for democratic consolidation has weakened because you've had a lot of pro-rights, pro-right governments, right-wing governments pushing more for security and trade, which is not bad, but at the cost of social justice. And a lot more support has been put into that than in supporting social justice, where you have a lot more citizen engagement. And therefore, we need more sustainable support for the work that needs to be done to really redeem us or save democracy. And that means supporting civil society, supporting activism, supporting civil society, engagement and contribution. The support needs to be sustainable and it needs to be less transactional. We need to have a bolder African union and echo us. Because I would say, and I would like again to talk about the era of Dr. Ibn Chambas in echo us and how much he worked with civil society or enabled echo us as an institution to work with civil society very close. And I believe a lot of the changes and the gains that were made in that time was due to that kind of relationship and openness to engage with citizens. So that needs to happen. And I believe that is considerably weakened now. And I also think that echo us because of it had not spoken very broadly against some of the constitutional amendments that took place in a number of the countries for tenure elongation in some of the countries. Some of these things not speaking early, not speaking boldly and taking action led to the challenges that we now have. And so echo us needs to go back to the drawing table and look at how it engages civil society a lot more. And looks at how itself, I mean, it's able to be bolder and the same I think would also go for the aid. So these are some of the suggestions I would like to give. I believe that when we have stronger citizen engagement and we build that kind of solidarity to push for effective public service delivery to push for anti-corruption to look at more transparency and accountability, the rule of law, equitable distribution of resources, human security, respect and fulfillment of human rights, looking at non-discrimination, and making sure that there's equal opportunity to development dividends. These are all parts of democratic governance. We need to round up now Nana. Yeah, it's not only elections. All these other aspects are important. And therefore, we need to have that kind of civic engagement to enable and push these things to happen. And I think that the suggestions I've made, I would hope, would be able to get us back to what it is where we used to be and maybe even better. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nana. Very, very important points you've raised there about civic engagement. And you have spoken more about the role of civil society. So this is quite getting quite interesting. Dr. Quitte looked at the role of parties. You're looking at the role of civil society. I'll give the floor now to Austin, who would look at recent digital development and how this is either contributing or creating opportunities for democracy and looking at questions around information, integrity and democratization in West Africa. Austin. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Let me appreciate, first of all, the team that has put it together. It's a worldwide conversation, particularly that we are in a global conversation at the moment, and especially as there is going to be a US-facilitated conversation on democracy. Adding up these voices could then mean that we have our impute into the outcome of that summit. I'd like to appreciate once more the keynote speaker who are elected in me to look at who has actually brought us something I would like to call the weakening of democracy. And I have this narrative that democracy is not able to meet the yenies of people anymore, so which means when proud said that democracy is not able to bring about the dividend of the people, that's almost like a 101 percent confident level that democracy is weakening by the day. So the first question I'd like to bring to the fore is what role is digital information, what role is it playing at democracy? Is it a cause or a blessing? Many people will argue that with a digital age, democracy should have advanced. With a digital age, we can hold governmental institutions to account. With a digital age, we don't need passport to travel to the US just like what is happening now. I don't have to be in South Africa or in Ghana or converging somewhere else, but I could be at the comfort of my house to interrogate the democratic norms and democratic architecture in the region. But before I go into that conversation on digital, I'd like to bring to the fore, but clearly with the sense where our conversation is more of the authoritarianism in the region and how digital tools are being used to suppress people and what ought to be the voice of the people I've been taking out. Let me bring to the fore. Specifically, zeroing in on Nigeria, even though the other panelists who have gone ahead of me, I talked more about other countries, Prof Meshon, Senegal, which is almost like a big challenge now if we don't intervene. I don't know if ECOWAS will be able to intervene. I know Nana just talked about the role of ECOWAS. I don't think that ECOWAS got the moral courage to intervene in the challenge of the democratic challenge in the region. It is with the people. Yes, civil society, but more of the people. The people need the power. The power of the people is more than the power of the people in power. So we need to begin to empower people in a way that they are able to take their own destiny using technology as it were to challenge the authoritarianism. Again, I said I was going to zero in on Nigeria. We've had in the past six years in Nigeria a government that came to power with peaceful means using technology, Twitter, Facebook, to engage the previous government. Professor Adibaya talked about the peaceful transition of the equipment, the equipment losing an election first time in the history of Nigeria, and that happened by way of organizing, organizing technological wise, organizing on the streets, and the same government who did all of this organizing and got into power, suddenly now know that technology is bad for the people. Suddenly now know that there will be no need to use technology because they now know the impact, so to say, of technology. Fake news is no longer big news. The greatest fake news is propaganda, and propaganda is from a government institution. We have had in this same regime, the way we have prohibition laws, the government is trying to come up with, for example, we have the national assembly trying to pull up after the anti-ass protests in order to suppress people. You know that Twitter was banned in this country in Nigeria, and more of our African countries have been to think in the same line to ban Twitter because Twitter is becoming like that, organizing platform. So what do you do? You make people, you make it look as if Twitter is our challenge. Twitter is not the challenge, the challenge is with those who manipulate Twitter against the people. So what am I saying? Why are people organizing against corruption, against bad governors in Nigeria specifically? We've had a lot of laws, the cyber crime law, for example, was passed, and the basis was to target, specifically target members of media who are seen to be critical of government, who are seen not just media alone, including civil society citizens who are classified as critical minds, who are classified as people with political dissent who they feel can mobilize a large number of people against government. So you come up with laws that target those individuals and keep them behind bar. What is different with the military regime, with the decree number two, decree number four, where someone can be arrested without questioning, and keep them behind bar without having to show in the court, or you go to a lower level court like the magistrate to get an injection and keep the person beyond 24 hours or 48 hours, and keep them there perpetually. We've had cases in the reports we just came up with recently, looking at democracy in the last 20 years in Nigeria, there's been huge and huge number of people behind bars who have never seen a court room, and they've been in the bar for more than 10 years. We have Abba, who was arrested because it was critical of the government to frustrate that state. We had a number of other individuals, we see Ashok Were, who is almost living like living in prison, even though it has been granted big. All of these laws are intended to come to deliberately undermine the voice of the people, to deliberately undermine those dissents. We've also had a position in the National Assembly where they come up with the protection against falsehood and manipulation bill, which was generally called the social media bill. What's the bill about? Oh, you don't allow people to use the social media against you, whereas the same regime uses the social media again from an incumbent they took over from. So it's becoming an ideological content that you don't need people to use social media because you know the power of social media. Because you know that you used social media before, you know what the capability is to undermine or to organize against the people. We had a 2012 Occupy Nigeria, then former President Jonathan, didn't know what to do, and they then opposition party took advantage of the social media platform and engaged properly. So there we have someone called President Muamadubuwari who came on board, who became president of Nigeria because of organizing from the social media content, from the online space, from the digital technology. But the same individual like I said before doesn't see that that is relevant, that no, we can't do that. The fake news is too much, the fake news is too much. We are not seeing social media does not have its own negative personality. No. What we are seeing is that social media, when you use social media, you provide information, it reduces the possibility of using social media to peddle this information at fake news. We also had the press council act in order to suppress media, to continue to oppress them, and countless amount of bills have come up in the Nigerian system with so him to undermine the ad and democracy. The ad won democracy. Those who are enjoying democracy a quote, or the politicians of today, were not in the struggle we talked about. Professor Dabaya talked about 30 years ago struggle. Where was President Muamadubuwari 30 years ago? Where was Artiku 30 years ago? Where were all of these people? These folks were engaged in a other aspect. President Muamadubuwari 30 years ago probably in 1993 was in the military, then a military head, but he never really fought for democracy. So becoming a democratic actor is a big challenge. So what do we need to do? As the summit has been organized, first we need the people united, we need people to be organized more, and one way to do that is to strengthen our electoral architecture. I would like the summit to push pressure, more pressure, arguably more pressure on the president of Nigeria to sign the electoral amendment B-2021 that electoral act may not be absolute. It may not be absolute to bring about the change. However, it will contribute to the landscape, the electoral landscape. Taking an example from what we just, from Gambia a few days ago election, we saw what I called a localization of electoral system. A local organizing that you don't, you don't need to spend so much money organizing elections. As it was panelist Dr. Manuel talked about the cost of election. Professor, Professor Adibayo talked about the cost of election. If you look at the cost of election in Nigeria and the cost of election in Gambia, we are going to say Nigeria is spending a fortune. Do we need that fortune? Of course no, even though we need those fortune, how do we make elections cheaper? In the way that election people who turn out to vote in elections are actually those who will change the surface and the last step of political architecture. What am I saying? In the Gambia, everyone saw the way the process was. It was so transparent that even when you are arguing, even though the opposition rejected it at some point, but there's almost going to be like why are you rejecting this election? Everything went according to plan. I would like to advocate that the president, Mr. President, the summit should advocate all the credit to send the electoral bill quickly and immediately receive the Twitter ban as quickly as possible. And thirdly, implement the judicial panel report of answers that is here on the table. That's here on the table until we put closure to the answers massacre of October 20, 2020. The agony of that look to get, like it to get, we continue to be on. And lastly, everyone who is involved with electoral practices should end some kind of, there should be some condition that deprive them from entry-safe even, like the US or the UK of this world, because of time I'll just stop at this point. Thank you very, very much, Austin. I think you have given your interventions brought a more activist slant onto the discussion. We will continue to encourage participants to use the Q&A function. At this time, what I'm going to do is set out a set of questions for the panelists to come back on, because I heard quite a number of proposals. And I think we actually came up with quite a number of issues as we went along. The reemergence of the military, I seem to hear one panelist saying there is actually no support for the military, but it would seem that the events in Mali in Guinea sort of showed some level of public support for the military. If we go outside the region and we look at how the transition in Zimbabwe was facilitated by the military and people did rejoice, what does this say to us about the future of elections, of democracy? There were also conversations about the need to control parties and parties having a role in promoting service delivery, accountability, and national cohesion. Can this really be achieved just by effectively managing or monitoring political parties and their activities? If we go parties to abide by the laws, publicly declare their finances, how will this come to the point of national cohesion? And I think I would like to also ask Nanae about citizens' role in promoting national cohesion, because I do see an important point on national, the link between cohesion and democratization in our countries. The other issues we're looking at recent laws that have been passed. So we're looking at countries passing laws on cyber security, laws to restrict the use of social media. Also NGO laws, laws restricting the space for NGOs to operate. But at the same time, we seem to always say legal reforms are the answer. How do we strike that balance of achieving reforms, but sidelining the political hijack of these reforms? The recent, you know, extensions of presidential tenures, they all came on the bed on the platform of legal reforms. So how do we strike that balance? Do we see any role for the African Union and the ECOWAS in relooking at spaces for reforms? And recently the ECOWAS protocol has been open for review. What proposals are we, you know, putting on the table for the review of the protocol to ensure that the institution we have in the region, which, you know, over the years have been named as one of the strongest, remains with that same outlook and that they actually can act as a supranational power when the national institutions fail us. For instance, on the issue of internet freedoms, it's important to note how, for instance, the role of the ECOWAS court in declaring the actions of the Togolese government illegal to have cut off the internet during elections, how much more of this can we see to bring to bring our intergovernmental bodies on board? I think, I don't know if I should call you in the order in which you spoke, or I'll just leave each of the speakers to turn on their videos and respond to any of these issues. The floor is open. Okay. Let me take, I think I, for me, what is important is we have to come to terms that multi-party democracy is the foundation upon which our civil and political rights are expressed, are guaranteed, and are actually actualized. And we often take our eyes from the parties in all the years that we've alternated between military group and parties or democracies multi-party, it's political parties or soldiers, political parties or soldiers. So what I'm saying is that we shouldn't just look at parties in terms of regulating their electoral behavior, and that's enough. It's not enough. We must now come to, in the second generation, because we've done a first generation where we've seen that, yes, elections, fine, we're managing it, we've developed several mechanisms, civil society, coalition this, echo what's come saying with some declarations and protocols and so on and so forth. But we also want parties to develop economies and ensure that our citizens' human rights, human development needs, are met. This hasn't been the case. We found them rather amassing wealth, using the state power to amass private wealth, and they've accumulated quite a few across. So what people are now expressing this affection towards is not their democratic rights. They are talking about the failure of political parties to give them their democratic development rights, and something that not many are craving that let the army come because those who know the army know that they couldn't deliver that. And yet we are also at a stage that we are not sure if the political parties can deliver it, given the framework within which they are operating today. They do not respect the rule of law. They are above the law. I can't hear how many political parties have been, have been prosecuted because the accounts that they submitted on the elections, one of their elections or whatever, does not match up to what was spent. Recently, the Chancellor of Austria had to resign because the police said when they scrutinized his expenditures, his record, they found out that he had used taxpayers' money for his PR in the elections. He disputed that and they said, no, you're putting him under investigations. So he had to resign. He's still leader of the Spartan parliament, but the foreign minister is now the Chancellor. We've seen how in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was accused of current favor from rich people, and therefore he's committed certain offenses for which is now being tried, and it even contributed to him not being able to gain the mandate he needed to govern. So corruption is one of the critical things that every serious democracy does, even include whether it's communist, China, or whether you're looking at it in terms of Israel or you're looking at it in terms of Germany and so on and so forth. In West African countries, largely, there is no action taking. So the parties are operating above the law of the state, and I'm saying the parties are not the state. They are an agent. We elect them to come and exercise still power, but even the institutions that should help them deliver the programs within the framework of the state, whether it's the civil service, the public service, the police, name them the local government service and so on, we've also found out that even these institutions, they want to take over them, change leaders. But let me ask you something because you're talking about parties and I wanted to maybe link this to parliaments, which are now gradually becoming just simply a co-opted space. I think it was in Nana that I spoke about parliaments becoming a rubber stand space for executive decisions. And you also then tried to link the rule of parties in social cohesion. I'd like to hear more about how you see the frameworks for political party regulation strengthening the effectiveness of parliaments and also now the work of the parties being agents of social cohesion. I would be interested to hear that. And if any of the panelists also want to jump in on this, please do. Doc, please go ahead. So, first of all, in parliament, parliament representatives of the people, I think we are recent elections in Ghana. No party got the kind of majorities they have. In fact, the difference between the majority party that is governing and the position party is one seat, one. But they used to have 40. They used to have 50. They used to have 35. And so it was significant enough that the majority party would always tell the minority, have your say. But we would have our way. We are the majority. We decide and so on and so forth. So we are in a situation now where the budget for this year has come under close scrutiny and the two parties in parliament, minority parties have not been gaining the mandate to go to parliament since 2012. And it's a serious situation, 2012, 2016 and 2020 elections. No minority party in our parliament. It's just these two dominant parties. They behave like monopolies, like two monopolies you have and so on. But parliament is governed by a whole lot of things. When you see that parliamentarians, especially are disagreeing and not coming to terms on important national issues, sometimes it signals that the party outside, the parent parties are interfering in parliamentary work. In Africa, the parent party wants to control the MPs, the chief whip. So we see it in two ways. At committee levels, where consensus is spelled, the numbers do not matter much. Consensus is spelled. They agree on what to do, aspects of the budget or education policy or social policy or whatever. But most times when you see that they split on the floor of parliament on the house, what they call the house, the plenaries and so on, you would also know that the political parties are involved in their directing affairs. This is what the situation is. But if you look at parliament alone, I think there are various mechanisms where different parties are able to work together as parliament, as lawmakers and not always the identity of their parties. There are times they come together. That is not the case with the executive, with the executive arm of government. The Nigerian situation is different because there's a federation and governance from different parties still gets access to money. They share of national revenue and the development plans they're operating and so on. But if you come to the unitary states, like Ghana and so on, you'll find out that the governing party, the president and his party, usually they go together, controls so much that opposition party in parliament does not have any other role in the executive arm of government. That's the situation in Ghana. But in your executive arm of government with the federal state, different parties are there, so the dynamics are different. So what I'm saying is that, but generally, we need more institutions to, you ask the question, what should happen at the level of the national level, the ECOWAS level, or level of the regional level, and probably the... Where you know that the intergovernmental bodies as well try to stay away from issues of political parties, they will tell you, we engage with governments. So if we are putting this, and we're looking at responsibility of parties, where are we then looking at ECOWAS and the EU and others? I think ECOWAS and the EU have gotten involved in elections because elections actually have become a predominant part of their role in governments, post-election governors. Whenever there's election Gambia, I guess because it is in Gambia, there's elections that I don't know whether it's there, but many of the ECOWAS, EU, Commonwealth, and so on, EU, they're all in there observing. And so elections have become the central focus, but the behavior at the developmental level, post-election, is showing that the elections you go and watch, and then you put your hands in the pocket and say, well, now you've elected the government, everything works, it's not working. It's turning, people are questioning, so do we elect you to make us, to keep us hungry, not take care of our needs and so on and so forth? And so and the behavior of the parties, the corruption, the monetization, the capture of the, what is called the capture of the state, the financiers who are coming from outside, the real business of parties and governments sometimes will tell you that they are not for development and improving the lives of everybody, but they are there to pay their debts and whatever money. So the important thing is, can we go beyond the protocol? I believe, yes. I believe we have come to a stage where the thing, thanks, and, you know, bio-nosedays, we've been talking about it, what is the next level? The protocols are not enough. The term limit, that says, don't go beyond two limits or whatever. We've seen that certain countries, the dynamics are different. If you took Togo and Gambia, there was once an attempt for the bio-eco us to deal with these matters and seal it, but then they didn't make the decision now. The problem, the most important thing is that elections are alone and not enough. So what institutions? That's why I'm referring to the framework for the governance of political parties. May I bring proof in here because I'm actually quite interested on, because when you speak of the intergovernmental bodies, they generally just tell you anything that has to do with political parties, you know, leave us out. We would rather deal at the level of government. Proof, are you there and any thoughts on this issue of social cohesion, moving away from elections, you know, as where we all focus on as, you know, democracy, looking at democracy, we dig just that tiny box of elections, moving towards countries where citizens consider themselves equal, where there's social cohesion, and there is accountability. How do we make that shift? Emmanuel is really pushing on for political parties and their role. Nana talking about civil society and their role. Austin as well spoke about civil society and their role, although as well a lot more on the need for government accountability. Any thoughts, very strong in terms of what we're taking on? Just to clarify, I am not pushing, I'm saying the governance framework for political parties is what we must, there's a huge gap that is the post-election governance. Okay, and if we have protocols to help manage elections, but the problems we are facing that is leading or are leading people to now say, hey, second term is not enough, or no, stick to your second term and so on, have to do with the dividends that are coming and the behavior of the political parties after elections, post-election. Okay, so I'm saying we need to look at the governance framework, post-election governance, because in West Africa, you are not an island itself. Ghana is not an island on its own. If it's making any disturbances or whatever with the elections, Ecuador would interfere. So the thing to say, well, Ghana is a governmental, we need a new layer of governance. Austin is disagreeing with you. I would say, please let Proph take the floor and then I'll go to Austin, who is shaking his fingers very, very, very quickly. Maybe for the purposes of continuing the debates, Austin can come in and I come after him. Okay, but, okay, let's hear what Austin's views are on that. Austin, did he drop off? Oh, is he there? Okay, good. Thank you. I was waiting for someone to unmute me. Yeah, see, we can give the voting of the sovereign state agitation to the ECOWAS. ECOWAS is a toothless dog. ECOWAS cannot. ECOWAS cannot. ECOWAS has not been able to resolve even the strongest, I agree, is the strongest regional body. I agree. I don't have a challenge with that. But who are those who make up the leadership of ECOWAS? It is a health of state. That is why they're unable to engage themselves. So you can imagine someone in Senegal, said at the time, he said it was not a two-term, I mean, two-term was okay for him. And at the time, he said the president of the Wadas regime was not good. We don't have to extend. I just want to do one, two-term, I'm done. Now, seeing the beauty of governance, now want to change the constitution in its favor. And you see what happened in Ije, you see what happened in Togo. Yes, Ghana has one of the strongest democracy in the region. And I'm happy the president of Ghana is also the chair of the commission, the chair of the health of state committee. But if what ECOWAS can only session, the same thing happened with the U.N., the U.N. when crisis was in Sudan, when the Dapho crisis was on, when they were killing folks in Dapho, in Blue Mine, and all of those, the U.N. maintains some level of silence because of this whole idea. We cannot, the people that is united, we never be undermined. We need a people organizing. We need people to take the governor system in their own hands. That's what happened in Gambia. And Gambia is a role model. All right. I think you do have an important point. I mean, I always try to point to the fact that in 2016, everybody reminded Gambia, you're not about to have an election and all the observers stayed away. And it was quite interesting because it was at that point, Gambia made a change and it was completely citizen led. That's an important one. Sorry, before you coming, I also have been making some advocacy at the level of the international observer space to say what is their role when countries open up constitution review processes and they hold referendum. In 2015, Rwanda changed its constitution. There were no observers there. Everybody left that. Then two years later, during the presidential elections, we all went there and we were writing statements to say there's a gap in the legal framework. There is no tenure, there's tenure there. So it's also important. I very recently at the conference, it was also one of the points I made that we can't look at elections. It is one political process, but Rwanda are also political processes as well. And where is the international community when those changes come to be? Prof. Well, thank you very much indeed. I think with regard to the role of our regional bodies, they seem to me to be trapped in a fairly self-contradictory situation. In so far as the subject of our discussion today is concerned. Because on the one hand, this is the 28th year of the West African Charter, the 28th anniversary of the Charter. On the one hand, we see an attempt to set regional norms and standards, which is welcome to say that if you belong to ECOWAS, then you have to observe a few things, including term limitation. And then they find themselves confronted with a situation in which some countries are violating those norms. Not only violating those norms, you also find a situation in which where movements, organizations of civil society or citizen groups challenge those violations in the ECOWAS court. You get every coast announcing that, okay, we don't recognize the court anymore. And there are no consequences, absolutely no consequences. And then you foreclose every avenue for orderly change at home. You block avenues for restraining your action from within organizations like ECOWAS and you belong to. And when the streets take over and you get overthrown, then a consortium of presidents will fly in and tell you to return to constitutional order. There is a problem there. There is a problem there. And I think what has played out has both exposed a serious deficiency, but also presented an opportunity. And I want to be positive about it by saying that the existing framework that enabled us to navigate the period from the 1990s, early 90s to date has run its course. And we are presented with an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and develop something that is more. And that, I think, can be built on observations that we have made of the behavior of elected politicians in office, in what is the very essence of democracy, appearing to use democratic processes to undermine democratic values and practices. So anybody can run a referendum if they like. Of course, as colleagues have said on the panel, we have parliaments that are practically dead or sleepy. We have a robust effort to propagate governmental fake news in the name of information and propaganda. We just pointed to and we have the suppression of independent voices through the narrowing of civic spaces, as Nana indicated. So obviously, you do a referendum, you rig the referendum, you get the results you want. Even Alpha Conde, the document she submitted to referendum was not the document she signed at the end of the day. So the referendum was just a cynical, stupid exercise, a waste of money, a waste of everybody's time. And for as long as his referendum was going to yield the results, there was no more COVID in Guinea, Conakry. The moment he got his referendum, COVID came back. And the opposition parties no longer campaign freely. So we have seen so many discontents and challenges that we are given an opportunity. Are there heads of states? Is there a commission? And are there West Africa-wide organizations like ours on this panel that are able to say that this is the moment for us to do a severe revamp, a deep revamp of all of these things? Under what conditions can you amend the Constitution? Can we tighten the rules? If you want to belong to ECOWAS. And we don't want a situation where heads of states come after the facts and try to thwart citizen power, because that's not going to work. And you suspend or expel, suspend Guinea, Conakry, and they say, okay, that's fine, keep your organization. It's fine. But don't appoint any special envoy to us either. And so on and so forth. So it's an unraveling of a system that has run its course. And there's a good opportunity here. And I also think that it speaks to the more general set of rules and processes that we have set up domestically. You see, we, in sympathy with Emmanuel's call on us to rethink political parties in Africa, with a set of political parties on the assumption that there will be parties that function like those in Europe and the U.S. Right? Even if we don't state it openly, there's an assumption that, well, you know, just have that electoral pluralism underwritten by multiple parties. And yet we have had a history of political parties also in Africa that we have not learned enough from. Right? In a few of the countries of our subregion, I would say that Ghana, for example, you know, in those days, we used to read Professor Ralph Austin and his claims about the two traditions, the dankwa and the incrumaist tradition, which basically made for a kind of two broad coalitions of political parties. Is that still relevant? Does that still apply? In the context of Nigeria, it's more ethno-regional that goes back to the Richard's constitution and the emergence of the tripodal, what the lidotry called the tripodal federal system. Does that still work? It has to make it possible for us to have political parties that are true to the meaning of their names. And as you know, in Nigeria, we don't even talk of political parties anymore. We talk of special-purpose vehicles. You use it to write the power, and the moment it doesn't have you anymore, you dump it and move to another one. So we really do need to, it's both a redesign issue, but also a redesign which, as I indicated, speaks to our context in a manner that is relevant and that is readable. And you cannot have parties without also being forward-looking. The conservative, I mean, okay, we copied the U.S. system in Nigeria, for example. The Democratic Party in the U.S. can count on an NDI, but can also count on a Brookings Institution. The Republican Party also has its own think tanks, even if not formally affiliated. Republicans know when they leave office, those of them who are the thinking arm of the party go into Republican think tanks. Just as the Democrats go into Democratic think tanks to plan for the next period in office. What do our political party leaders do? What do our elected officials do when they leave office, waiting to fight the next round of elections? I doubt that they are invested in programmatic thinking, helping us to think about our future for the next 20 years or 30 years, studying the world that is changing around us to better understand. And that idea of programmatic parties, which international idea has pushed, we experimented with various things in Ghana towards the last but one elections to get them to have manifestos around national resource governance and the like and the like. They can do it on paper, but they don't leave it in actual fact and we need to be able to revisit that. And some degree of engineering might need to be put in place. Thank you. Back to you. Thank you so much. Engineering, that is the point. Yeah, you have, you have, you've raised them in very, very concrete points. One, about rethinking the current ECOA structure we have, it has served a purpose. 20 years down the line, where are we with that? What proposals should we be making? And I also see you point about the roles of the regional courts. When the spaces at home are closed, do we have regional courts that can take on the grievances of the different parties? Nana, I think you had an intervention. Yeah, I want to speak to that actually. I mean, I think that one of the challenges, I believe that ECOAS does have a role and I think that it has been spoken about. ECOAS does have some teeth. It's not toothless. It needs to use the teeth that it has. And I think that that has been one of the challenges that we've had. And one of the courses is also because you have very little linkage between what is happening at regional level and at national level when it comes to ECOAS. And so, for example, when an ECOAS community court passes a ruling, it must be something that you have the structures even within country to be able to enforce that ruling. And because we lack this linkage, this system that links that what happens at the regional level, the norms that we have at the regional level, what's actually happening in practice, you do have a challenge. And that is one of the problems that we have. So the ECOAS community court is great. I mean, it's a court of first instance where you actually, it's one of the few that we have when you're talking about these international courts where you can actually have individuals go to the court directly without even going through their countries first, their systems. But then you have this problem where they can make a judgment and a country can say, I'm not going to respect it and nothing happens. So those are some of the challenges. ECOAS needs to use the teeth that it has. And so it has, because it's not been doing that, it has lost the moral authority that it has. I also think that I support the points that Dr. Akwiti made about political parties and their regulation. I think that it's one of the main problems that we have. And I believe that it's important. We need to look at the system, the political parties, and as key within our electoral system and governance. But also I think we need to look at the political systems that we have. You know, this first past the post system that we have and this winner takes all kind of system. Is it helping us? Can we have a system that is contextualized to what it is that would work for us? And I'm not sure if we've really done, there may be, and that's where perhaps the think tanks can really help here. We need to look at what can work for our context and something like that. And also to decentralize our governance. I think that is also key. The point about people supporting military coups in countries like Guinea, I mean, it's clearly because they've not been, you know, they've not seen, they enjoyed the dividends of democracy. They are disillusioned. And for many that the vast population who are mainly youth, they've not really lived other than military government. So they have not experienced what it is. They just romanticize the parts that they've heard about military governments, the order that comes, you know, with that. And because of the disorder and the chaos that they see with democracy, they think of that and they want to have that. But I think that's also the chance. There's one thing you mentioned about NGOs and the laws. And I think I need to make a point there that we should live, we live under rule of law, not ruled by law. It's rule of law. So we still need the legal reform where it's necessary. It's important to get that. But I think particularly when it comes to NGO laws, civil society needs to be part or parcel of that process, you know, to look at laws that would affect them. And I think that is one of the key areas. And for me, I would continue to harp on civil society pushing together and working together. And I think at regional level, at national level, we need a lot more of that happening. If we want to see change, change happening, you know, the transformational change that we want in our country. So that would be my answer. Thank you so much, Nana. We are actually on the dot of our closing time. But Austin sent a message. He wants to make an intervention, which I will say is your closing thoughts. And it's like one minute because I just have to like sum up in terms of what I think we've heard and what we want to take on to the summit tomorrow. Thank you so much. So first, I think we need an echo that can work for us. Equals architecture at the beginning was not necessarily for political community. It was an economic community. At some point, there was that level of that governance architecture and all of that. The community is working and there's no issue with that. So we need an echo that can work for us. And for political parties, no one wants change. It is already accepted that political parties are the weakest link to democratic consolidation everywhere and everywhere around the world, but clearly in the African continent, particularly in Nigeria. However, for us, with the new Electoral Act in Nigeria, that we ask present body to sign as quickly as possible ensures a selection process that involve every member of party. We need to get out the money backs from the system. They should have equal rights and they lack those individuals without the resources. So if you make party really citizen driven or membership driven, paying dues and all of that, we will gradually curtail the essence of political party. Electoral management body in Nigeria, for example, there's a part that talks about election monitoring and party management can actually be empowered to monitor political parties. And if we do that, when citizens or party members do have a senior party who gradually build a democracy that we need. Again, echo is good. I'm happy to say they have teeth, but I'm not too sure that that teeth is political or that teeth is military. Who are those who send the echo more? Who are those responsible for echo more? If President Boris says today is going for a third term, can echo stopping? My answer is no. Thank you. Thank you very much, Austin. I think we all, well, we all agree that the intergovernmental bodies have a role. It's just the level of the involvement is what we are not agreed on. But to round up this conversation, first, I'd like to thank all the panelists and our participants that stayed through the conversation. And I mean, the purpose of this is we are trying to make proposals for the global democracy summit coming up over the next two days. I think for West Africa, what I hear or saying is we need to look at the role and the structures of our intergovernmental body. Echoes, we all appreciate that they have been quite strong over the years. And Echoes remains like your foremost regional economic body when you think of the continent. But for where we are today are there reforms that need to take place? What I hear you say is yes. Two, there's a need for Echoes to engage more with civil society and to also create spaces for regional comparative learnings using clear think tanks and different institutions like the ones we have on board here today to be more linked and to provide spaces for research and comparative learning. I also hear a lot more about Echoes needing to go beyond just their presence during elections, but to look at the period in between elections, particularly the possibility of setting up structures that can monitor reform processes. So that when reform processes are getting hijacked or that they are being used for individual purposes, what can the intergovernmental body do? We have interest in seeing that. At the national level, we have interest in seeing us move beyond electoral democracy where we can check the box to say we have held an election, but we are looking at governments that deliver so that citizens are not so dissatisfied that when they see the army, then they see the army as an alternative. We didn't go into very practical steps on how that transition could be made, but I heard clear proposals on the role of civil society in achieving that level of accountability. The need to revamp, sorry, no, to review existing regulatory structures for political parties and to ensure that parties are not just vehicles to access power, but that they become vehicles through which we can hold our governments accountable. Also vehicles that also for them to become institutionalized to the point that they become law abiding themselves and then they can become spaces where elected officials can also be held accountable to be law abiding. I think I also had a lot more on strengthening our electoral, reviewing our electoral systems to make them less exclusionary and also to develop systems that would promote more effective parliament because with the first past the post system, we seem to have parliament that just basically panda. And then there were very clear calls that were Nigeria specific looking at the answer as reports, the need for governments to pass any pending reforms that have bearing on electoral processes. Yeah, and I think these are some of the key things and then the need to undertake initiatives that promote social cohesion so that as countries we don't just have people that exist together along political lines, but that can see themselves as equal citizens within a space that works democratically and politically. I think these are like the main points I'm teasing out from this conversation. And I'd like to thank our panelists, Professor Lukoshi, Dr. Kuete, Nana Fazenou, Austin Aimee. Thank you so so much. I'd like to thank my colleagues at IDEA who have helped to host this event behind the scenes. Elisenda, Amanda, Mohammed, thank you very much for your support. And with this, I think I'll say we've had a good conversation. The recording of this, I think, will be available on our YouTube channel. Elisenda, I hope I'm correct about that. And people can still access the discussion. Okay, so Elisenda confirmed that yes, it will be available on our YouTube channel and this can be accessed for those who couldn't either join in or would like to view it later. Thank you all so so much for your time and your contributions.