When ECOWAS leaders downed the last bottle
The other day, when my five-year-old son returned from school, the first question he asked me was to tell him about World War I.
With my little ‘sito’ history under the belt, I gave him a full brief.
The next day, when he got back, he asked me: “Dad, please what happened during World War II (WW II)?”
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Befuddled, I scratched my head. I was wondering whether the evening and weekend cartoon binges were giving the little one crazy ideas.
I gave him a small tutorial about the WW II atrocities. I told him about Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, the one who initiated WW II, and his infamous propaganda chief, Joseph Geobells.
I told him that Geobells was the Nazi Party’s spin doctor whose theory was that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
I also told the little one about the cataclysmic end to Hitler’s brutish empire.
And then reminded him about the Marshal Plan—the European Recovery Programme, by the USA, to aid Western Europe following the devastation wrought upon the continent by WW II.
Since my son likes mentioning millions of dollars (to him, every amount is millions of dollars), I reminded him that the Marshal Plan provided more than US$15 billion to resuscitate Europe after Hitler’s calamitous escapades.
Then when we were just about concluding our draining history lessons, there’s an update on my phone about an ECOWAS Heads of State meeting in Accra, ‘the future cleanest city in Africa.’
Fortunately for all of us, the meeting was held at the weekend, so the razzmatazz that comes with any congregation of our elected monarchs was absent.
You know, Ghanaians love God and so most of the Seventh Day Adventist folks went to the synagogues workshopping on Saturday, while our leaders met to deliberate on the “unknown future of a turbulent West Africa.”
The rest of us, Sunday churchgoers, were also busying ourselves with how to deal with the new fuel price hikes. In fact, the price per litre of fuel has out-sprinted the US dollar and has firmly planted itself around GHS6.2 for a ‘bottle’, in my late grandpa’s voice.
I waited with baited breath for the end of the “59th Ordinary Session of the Authority of ECOWAS Heads of State and Government.”
Then after all the champagne had been served, the much-awaited communique was released.
It contained items such as:
COVID-19 response - never mind that this only meant they have agreed to wait for the ‘obroni’ to gift us leftover vaccines or the ones “which cannot be administered in the US.”
They talked about the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Just forget about the spectacle that Nigeria, the most powerful country in the 15-member regional economic bloc, closed its borders to the rest of us before COVID-19 was discovered in Wuhan, China in November 2019.
The ECOWAS leaders were also audacious enough to verbalise their dreams about security in the sub-Region and actually talked about the strength of the regional bloc in combating piracy and the Mali crisis!
Whatever the above lines meant didn’t wake me from my daydream, until I heard about a new moving date for achieving a single currency status for the ECOWAS countries.
I can bet my last Cedi savings, which is converted into the future ECO currency would turn my household and I into immediate paupers that the yeast in the champagne taken by our leaders over the weekend induced something bizarre ‘in our revered elected monarchs.’
In fact, they announced a 2027 date for achieving the ECO currency status! Ooops!
Wow! The Saturday communique actually sounded to me like the first communique read at the Abuja Accords in 1975, when ECOWAS was birthed.
These guys are always giving “moving dates and making future impossible promises!
And of course, this always happens when the last glass of champagne is “downed.”
Please what’s the meaning of ECOWAS?
