Accra: Vice President Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang has warned that fragmented and uncoordinated security responses in West Africa and the Sahel are no longer sustainable. She is calling for stronger preventive, intelligence-led, and cooperative approaches to address the region's growing security challenges.
According to Ghana News Agency, Prof. Opoku-Agyemang highlighted the evolving threat landscape, marked by terrorism, violent extremism, organized crime, and cyber insecurity, which demands collective action that links security, foreign policy, and development agendas in a coherent and practical manner. She was addressing a ministerial meeting of the High-Level Consultative Conference on Regional Cooperation and Security in Accra. The convening will culminate in a Summit of Heads of State and Government on Friday, January 30, 2026.
The High-Level Consultative Conference is discussing security and related challenges affecting the region, including terrorism, violent extremism, transnational organized crime, and maritime insecurity in the Gulf of Guinea. It aims to provide a platform for leaders to review existing peace, security, and governance initiatives, renew coordinated regional approaches, and strengthen collaboration through sustainable mechanisms.
The Vice President emphasized that Ghana's President places high value on the conference, given the urgency of forging a shared understanding of the region's security challenges. Prof. Opoku-Agyemang stated that the ministerial session was central to the consultative process, noting it as the platform where technical assessments must be translated into clear policy direction and where national priorities must be aligned to inform regional choices.
She observed that contemporary security threats were increasingly transnational and interlinked, cutting across borders, institutions, and traditional policy silos. According to her, violent extremism, terrorism, organized crime, cyber threats, and persistent youth unemployment were mutually reinforcing challenges that could not be effectively addressed through isolated national responses.
The Vice President stated that experience within and beyond the region had shown that fragmented approaches were inadequate to deal with the complexity of today's threats. She stressed that effective regional cooperation depended on timely information sharing, joint analysis, and coordinated responses, adding that acting together and proactively helped countries to identify risks early and reduce the cost of responding after crises had already escalated.
She described prevention as a practical necessity rather than an abstract ideal, urging ministers to ensure that regional initiatives were designed with implementation in mind. She said clear roles and responsibilities, strong institutional frameworks, and alignment with national priorities were essential if cooperation was to move beyond rhetoric to deliver tangible results.
Prof. Opoku-Agyemang cautioned that without institutional coherence and credibility, even well-designed policies would struggle to produce impact on the ground. She said sustained progress relied on ownership and the capacity of institutions to translate political decisions into concrete action. The Veep urged participants to balance ambition with realism, ensuring that recommendations of the conference reflected the scale of the challenges while remaining grounded in institutional capacity and national contexts.
Mr. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Minister for Foreign Affairs, painted a stark picture of the human cost of insecurity in the region, revealing that terrorism was claiming an average of about 44 lives every single day in West Africa and the Sahel. Mr. Ablakwa said the region now accounted for between 47 and 59 percent of all recorded global terrorist incidents, indicating that the epicenter of global terrorism had shifted from the Middle East to West Africa and the Sahel.
He stated that over the past 15 years, terror attacks in the region had increased by more than 1,200 percent, while deaths linked to such attacks had risen by nearly 3,000 percent. The Minister described the figures as a grim daily reality for communities across the region and said the statistics required urgency and coordinated regional action.
Mr. Ablakwa said the security challenges confronting the region were interconnected and transnational, ranging from violent extremism in the Sahel and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea to trafficking across porous borders and other forms of organized crime. He emphasized that no country could confront the threats alone and described the absence of a clearly agreed regional mechanism to address trans-border security challenges as unacceptable.
The Foreign Affairs Minister said intelligence cooperation must extend beyond a narrow focus on kinetic threats to encompass the economic, social, and governance pressures that extremists and criminal networks exploit, including climate stress, food insecurity, youth unemployment, and weak border communities. He called for a new culture of trust, transparency, and actionable intelligence-sharing, noting that fragmentation and suspicion had undermined collective security efforts in the past.
Mr. Ablakwa proposed four guiding principles for renewed cooperation: trust among states, mobilization of resources from within the continent, integration of security with development and governance, and foresight through credible, regionally owned early-warning systems.