At traffic intersections in Accra, the capital of Ghana, itinerant hawkers create pop-up mini markets to sell goods to rush-hour commuters.
Sunglasses, pillows, doughnuts, peanuts boiled fresh in the shell, and colourfully-wrapped made-in-Ghana Golden Tree chocolates are briskly traded before the lights turn green.
But not everyone is selling. There is also a growing throng of children and mothers knocking on vehicle windows, asking for alms for their next meal.
They are migrants from the Sahel — Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Chad — who have been forced from their homes by jihadist terrorism fuelled by weapons from the conflict in Libya.
These people are living proof of the desperate security situation for millions in the region.
This is one of three major problems the government of Ghana wants to see addressed during its two-year tenure on the UN Security Council, which began on January 1. The others are climate change and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea.
After their defeat elsewhere, jihadist franchise groups have gravitated towards the Sahel. The violence they wreak is increasing in frequency and brutality. Attacks targeting civilians in the region have risen from 381 in 2015 to 7,108 in 2021, with 12,519 fatalities, up from 1,394 over the same period, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
In 2020, seven of the top 10 terrorism-risk countries in the world were in Africa.
This bloody phenomenon is driving the forced migration evident in Accra, as well as human trafficking, including the headline-grabbing Mediterranean crossings in small boats to Europe.
But there’s another driver of the tragedy — climate change. Lake Chad sums that up: the largest water body in the Sahel, it is estimated to have shrunk by 90 per cent in 60 years. Temperatures in the Lake Chad Basin are rising one-and-a-half times faster than the global average.
The worsening climate has triggered violent conflicts between nomadic herders heading south in search of pasture and water and farmers in the savannah and forest belts threatened by streams of new arrivals and their anaemic livestock.
Jihadis eager to extend their footprint then promptly occupy vacated towns and villages, using them as bases to encroach ever southward.
Worryingly, the security threats in west Africa now include piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. In 2020, all but one of the world’s 28 kidnappings recorded at sea occurred in these waters. Similarly, in 2018, all six hijackings at sea, and 13 of the 18 incidents of ships fired upon occurred in the Gulf of Guinea. Of the 141 hostages held at sea that year, 130 were captured by pirates here.
Oceans Beyond Piracy, a project of Colorado-based non-profit One Earth Future Foundation, estimated the annual cost of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea at over $800mn as of 2017.
Insecurity in this maritime area constitutes a threat to international traffic at a time of Covid-related disruptions to global supply chains. Yet despite the obvious global impact, and the chilling effect on foreign investments and the livelihoods of coastal communities, the Gulf of Guinea countries bear the burden of naval deployments and policing that most of them can ill-afford. International naval patrols were deployed to rid the Gulf of Aden of pirates; so why not the Gulf of Guinea?
Beating back terrorism, climate change and piracy in Africa cannot be left to a handful of west African countries when the consequences of inaction are global. They require the attention of the UN Security Council, and a recognition that the responses to the threats to world peace today and in the future should be different from the traditional peacekeeping approaches applied in Congo and Lebanon. We need innovative, nimble mandates, together with technical and financial support, to enable us Africans to lead them ourselves. Ghana is eager to work with the UN Security Council to end the violent extremism and terrorism threatening our countries.
Africans stood with the rest of the world to fight the wars of the last century. We sacrificed lives to stabilise the global system that powered the prosperity enjoyed in much of the industrialised world today.
My Ugandan friends say: “The one who gets a good harvest of pumpkins forgets the one who gave them the seeds.” May this not be said of the world’s industrial nations when Africa needs them. In any case, inaction now only increases the cost of action if delayed. It’s the English who have a saying for that: “Penny-wise, pound-foolish.”
Source: Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, Minister of Foreign Affairs
