 by commending the coalition for dialogue on Africa, for providing a forum for this much needed conversation and for their track record over the years in living up to the refrain that Africans are entirely capable of finding the best solutions to their problems. I must also commend the chair of the coalition for my president, for devoting most of his time resources and prodigious energy especially since leaving office to Africa's most important causes. I'm aware that the coalition is also promoting vaccine manufacturing in Africa and issues of domestic resource mobilization among other big causes and we really commend you for all of that hard work. The theme of this event rising to the challenge of consolidating democratic governance is wholly appropriate and timely. In any event the spate of extra constitutional disruptions up to democratic governance should urgently focus our minds on this very crucial matter. Twenty-three years ago we in Nigeria discarded the yoke of dictatorship and took up the reins of democracy. Since then a generation of Nigerians has come of age but that only knows civil rule and assumes as of right the power to choose their own leaders. This is also the longest stretch of democratic governance in our history. We've witnessed a series of peaceful transitions of power, a huge credit to the democratic sensibilities of our people. Along the way we are learning valuable lessons that can only make us better practitioners of the liberal democracy that we adopted. We may be in the 23rd on broken year as a democracy but in the grand scheme of things our country as is the case with several other African countries is still a young democracy. Many of our institutions are still in their infancy and we must carefully guide and nurture them into maturity. The price of liberty as it said is eternal vigilance. As one of the oldest democracies in the region that has long been played by autocratic and extra constitutional regimes democracy itself has now become part of the portfolio of our national exceptionalism. Our armed forces are subordinated to civilian command and are fully committed to defending our constitutional order against internal and external threats. When the brave men and women of our armed forces are mobilized for internal missions they do so under rules of engagement consistent with the principles of military assistance to civil authority and military assistance to civil power. We have a relatively strong civil society that continues to push for greater accountability transparency and the deepening of democratic practice. In keeping with our foreign policy tradition Nigeria has been a clear and strident voice for the promotion of democracy on the continent and we have been resolute in condemning extra constitutional seizures of power. Historically we've also worked hard to restore and preserve democracy in several countries of the world in places such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia in recent history. At the same time the events now happening beyond our borders impose a burden on us to exemplify the highest manifestations of democracy at home so that we can more credibly promote it abroad. In 2015 we made history when an opposition party defeated the ruling party in a national election and a peaceful transition of power followed. In so doing we vaulted over a hurdle that we have fallen at in previous attempts at democratic governance. Since then we've seen more and more elections at the subnational level feature transitions between parties certainly we witnessed electoral contests in which main membership of the ruling party is not a guarantee of victory. These are undeniable signs of our growth as a democracy but there remains of course mutual for improvement and we'll come to those issues. However free and democratic elections by themselves are not enough to secure a democratic culture and we must situate governmental legitimacy within a broader matrix of democratic practice. We must secure active citizen participation in the political process and in civic life somehow the people must believe in and own the credo of democracy. Second we must ensure the protection of human rights of all citizens and groups and in this context the intentional institution and implementation of protections for minority groups is crucial. This is a safeguard and an assurance that electoral democracy does not lead practically to ethnic majority terror and the marginalization of minorities and ultimately fuel instability and strife. The promise of the creation of states is also a promise to democratize development at the subnational level. So stronger and more autonomous states will bring us closer to that objective and this is important because one of the reasons why we have a federal system and one of the reasons why we insisted on the creation of states is because we believe that there must be the democratization or development at the subnational level and that can only be brought to fusion to fruition if we're able to ensure that those states have greater autonomy and are stronger and are given more powers. We'll come into the questions of devolution or power. Let me turn briefly anyway to the question of African democracy and the world order. The factors and forces that have historically shaped the trajectory of democracy in Africa are not only local as we know they are also external and global. From colonialism and the Cold War to the advent of globalization and the war on terror Africa has been a space of significance within the geopolitical order. In all these contexts relations with the great powers have had a significant impact on the temper of relations between the state and civil society and more broadly on the democratization of our continent. During the Cold War authoritarian regimes dominated the political landscape with the rival superpower blocs providing support for their respective crime stakes regardless of their democratic credentials or lack thereof. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s the tide turned decisively in favor of democratization. In many African countries the ballot box became the primary determinant of power location but it could be argued that the principal factor that triggered this shift was that the geostrategic calculations which had necessitated support for those dictatorial regimes by the superpowers had changed. So clearly what even determined you know the legitimacy or at least what preserved those regimes at the time was where the geostrategic calculations of the superpowers lay. To be sure one overall lesson that we can draw from recent history is that the great powers have been fit fully selective in their support for democracy and for the most part predicated their support for democracy or democratization on the continent on their own calculations of their strategic interests. Democracy is a journey obviously and not a destination and a transformative journey is necessarily fraught with a significant degree of uncertainty and chaos. The advanced democracies of the world all have had similar evolutionary issues and problems and we too are currently on our own arc of democratic growth. The great powers have tended to favor stability in quotes even if that means supporting authoritarian regimes or despotic military hunters as long as that fulfills their vital interests whether it is fretted access to resources or the guarantee of preferential terms of trade and these are the issues. The great powers may be justifiably accused of double standards for providing support for some dictatorships while reserving strict essential for others. These days of course a criticism of one of the great powers and I will not mention names is that it is insufficiently vested in human rights and other democratic felicitates in dealing with African nations. It is criticized for its uncritical embrace of despotic governments as client states. However this very criticism can be leveled against all great powers that have engaged with Africa in the past. It is clear that the interests of the great powers are rarely consistent with the democratic yearnings of the of African publics generally. We've seen in recent times that in the countries in which democratically elected governments have been toppled such as Mali and Burkina Faso a world of nationalistic sentiment has been rippling through the state and civil society. Indeed an element of the rhetorical justification for some of the recent coups has been the portrayal of ousted governments as proxies of colonial power. While we recognize that for reasons of strategic expediency and sovereign agency countries are entitled to pivot to whichever nations align with their interests care in this instance must be taken to ensure that we do not end up tragically paradoxically positioning us type of colonialism with another. We must not allow our continent to become as it was in the Cold War era a fertile or proxy wars and great power conflict. We know from experience that this would result in a deepening of the recession of democratic values in Africa. The militarization of civil society whether by local military regimes or rival foreign military industrial complexes can only set us back by several decades. Our commitment to democratization must be predicated on the aspirations of our people and not on the wings of foreign powers. Let me also briefly return to the question of the apparent turning back of the democratic clock in parts of our continent. The recent spate of military coups across our continent and attempts at military coups not only pretends the risk of damaging democratic of a damaging democratic recession but it also takes us back to the cycles of extra constitutional disruptions that plagued us decades ago and which we assumed already to be a part of the close chapter of our journey. Since 2017 there have been 12 military coups in Africa and half of them occurred since 2020. Two months ago the democratically elected government of Burkina Faso was overthrown while only in February there was an attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau which was thankfully repelled. This much is clear. We know that we cannot secure the Africa that we want by turning back the hands of the democratic clock. We've walked these bony roads before. We have many decades worth of bitter experience and unimpeachable lessons of our history declare lessons of our history in that despotism cannot guarantee the security and prosperity of our people. The investment of faith and hope in dictatorial regimes during the 70s and 80s clearly did not lead to El Dorado. Our countries were trapped in cycles of constant of evil of oscillating between coups and counter coups, insurrections and civil wars. No matter how dire our circumstances may be we now have concrete proof that resort to extra constitutional regimes is not the way forward. However for those of us that bear the mantle of democratic leadership today these attacks on constitutional governance should be the subject of deeper reflection. People vote because their votes are the instruments with which they can alter their material circumstances for the better. It is this sense of hope and possibility that will sustain our democracies and it must be kept alive and can only be kept alive by delivering on our own end of the social contract. In so doing we must address the pervasive sense of frustration and concern in the continent that democratically elected governments have yet to deliver on the huge promise of democratization. Beyond this in many instances in our region and on the continent at large what is at stake is not merely the viability of democracy as a model or system of governance it is the legitimacy of the state itself. The preamble to the African Charter of Human Rights and People's Rights affirms that it is henceforth essential to pay particular attention to the right to development and that civil and political rights cannot be dissociated from economic social and cultural rights in their conception as well as their universality and that the satisfaction of economic and social and cultural rights is a guarantee for the enjoyment of civil and political rights. It's my conviction that the practical fulfillment of the rights that are enshrined in this Charter is the only objective meaning that democracy can have for our people and the Charter itself offers us a tool for imagining the Africa that we want. The progress of our democracies on this continent must therefore be pursued in terms of the struggle to address the basic problems of ill health, malnutrition, illiteracy and farming would daily affect our people. Where social and economic rights are unsecured people are unable to fully maximize their civil and political rights and that really is the truth. We really cannot talk of civil and political rights where social economic deprivation prevails. For instance, access to qualitative education enhances and enriches freedom of expression and of course freedom of thought and conscience. Conversely, pervasive illiteracy can nullify the freedom of expression itself. In any event, the very right to life must depend on the fulfillment of socioeconomic rights. In the progressive vision, political rights and socioeconomic rights are mutually reinforcing and in any event the fulfillment of the social contract is perhaps the only enduring value proposition of democracy. Let me conclude by noting that it is a testament to our democratic commitment in Africa that we have been united in condemning the toppling of electric governments in the region. The immediate imposition of sanctions on extra constitutional regimes by the economic community of West African state records and the concurrence of the African Union not only demonstrates a unity of purpose on this issue, it is also an unequivocal affirmation of a pan-African consensus on democratic norms. Yet we must also acknowledge a criticism that has been leveled against our responses so far and this is one highlighting a mismatch between our immediate and uncompromising condemnation of military regimes and then our relatively lukewarm reproaches to electric governments that fail to act in West consistent with democratic values. In other words we have developed a fairly robust language of censure and a sophisticated punitive framework for responding to extra constitutional political interventions but we have not yet been able to formulate a similarly sophisticated framework for addressing the infractions of elected governments that fall short of democratic best practices or break faith with their citizens. If this concern is left unaddressed it will deepen the perception of regional groupings such as ECOWAS has been no more than elite transitional clubs or powerful leaders only interested in maintaining their own privilege. It will ultimately lead to an erosion of the legitimacy of the African of the pan-African institutions that our nations have labored hard to build for so many decades to fill this vacuum and in order to prevent it from being hijacked by extra constitutional interlopers and adventurers I believe that we must revitalize institutions such as the african peer review mechanism to promote transnational collaborative learning and leadership on democratization and good governance on the continent. The ECOWAS protocol also on democracy and good governance which is currently being reviewed with this issue in mind is another tool which we can deploy to enhance democratic governance in the region. This is a moment of peril for democracy in our region because we are navigating a perfect storm of adverse circumstances a world economy that is reeling from the recessionary shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Price and supply disruptions from the war in Ukraine the emergence of armed non-state actors and all challenges associated with catering for the youngest populations in the world. There is also and this is also a moment of opportunity one in which we can reflect on a democratic progress strengthen institutions and deliver on socioeconomic development and deepen our commitment to building successful democratic states. I wish you all today very fruitful deliberations. Thank you very much.