A crucial summit of Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) leaders is ongoing in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, BBC reports.
“West Africa is also poised to start work on a 1,028km (689 miles) highway from Ivory Coast’s main city Abidjan – through Ghana, Togo and Benin – to Nigeria’s biggest city Lagos.” It said.
It added that construction of the superhighway supposed to start in 2026 and pledges of $15.6bn (£12.3bn) have already been mobilised from a range of funders and investors.
The road will connect many of West Africa’s largest cities – Abidjan, with 8.3 million people, Accra (4 million), Lomé (2 million), Cotonou (2.6 million) and Lagos, estimated at close to 20 million or perhaps even more.
Construction of the proposed four-to-six lane motorway is forecast to create 70,000 jobs, with completion ambitiously targeted for 2030.
For instance, the proposed highway and rail line promise to further speed the flow of trade and travel between the coastal economies.
Just as the EU transformed trade and development across the European continent, it will also.boost competitiveness and integration and transforming the region’s attraction for investors.
The plan to build a modern transport corridor along the West African coast was originally approved eight years ago – long before the coups that have overturned civilian rule in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
While faced with this blow to regional unity, the summit also focused on the morale-sapping departure of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from their 15-member bloc Ecowas.
Truth Live News gathered that just as Western Europe matched the Soviet-led communist bloc with a “Common Market” that later evolved into today’s trading powerhouse, the European Union (EU), so Ecowas may find that a drive for prosperity and growth proves to be its most effective response to the wave of military coups and nationalism that have swept across the region since 2020.
Also, report has it that, the defiant regimes declared they would leave the 15 -member bloc altogether.
Despite the loss of vast tracts of the Sahara and the departure of Mali, Burkina and Niger, the bloc will lose 76 million of its 446 million people and more than half its total geographical land area.
Meanwhile, emerging report said the coup leaders are not pulling out of the West African CFA franc, an eight-country single currency, backed by France, that hampers competitiveness but provides a solid defence against inflation and monetary instability.
For not only do Mali, Niger and Burkina face severe development and security challenges, but they are also all landlocked, and heavily dependent on their coastal neighbours, through transport, trade and labour migration.
“They have subsequently spurned the remaining members’ efforts to persuade them to stay,” news said. “Although the Ecowas envoy, Senegal’s new, young President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who shares their nationalistic outlook, is still trying.”