President John Dramani Mahama is urging African countries to reduce dependence on external funding for peace and security and invest in regional integration, trade and inclusive governance as tools for conflict prevention.
Speaking at the Tana Forum, President Mahama said Africa must fund its own peace outcomes, describing external dependency as a model that undermines African solutions.
"My brothers and sisters, that is not an African solution to African problems. That is external dependency disguised in an African beret. We must fund our own peace outcomes," he said.
He identified regional integration as critical, arguing that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) should not be viewed purely as a commercial project.
"We often view the African Continental Free Trade Area purely as a commercial project. That is a mistake. The African Continental Free Trade Area is perhaps our architecture for conflict prevention," President Mahama said.
"When you integrate markets, you raise the opportunity cost of war. You make your neighbor more valuable to you as a trading partner and a supplier than as a geopolitical adversary."
He said integrated value chains can destroy illicit economies that fuel conflict, including smuggling of minerals, illegal tax roadblocks and warlordism. He also cited the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) as a tool to reduce vulnerability to external shocks by allowing intra-African trade in local currencies, commending Ethiopia for joining the system and urging other countries to follow.
"Trade cannot replace political settlement but poverty and border friction will always guarantee war," he noted.
President Mahama said Ghana is practicing what it preaches through the Sahel-Gulf of Guinea Accord, a coalition of the willing for peace and security cooperation proposed by Ghana to replace the Accra Initiative. He said Ghana is working with neighbours to promote bilateral, mini-lateral and multilateral security cooperation.
He stressed that security starts with citizens, not soldiers, saying "in our northern communities we learn that the first line of defense is not the soldier but the citizen who trusts the state enough to speak."
On relations with the Alliance of Sahel States, he said Ghana has not closed the door despite their divergent path, revealing he has appointed a special envoy to maintain dialogue.
"When our neighbor in the Alliance of Sahel States chose a different path we did not close the door to them. We appointed a special envoy to keep that conversation open because geography has made us neighbors and no border post can stop a threat that we refuse to discuss amongst ourselves."
President Mahama also called for a rethink of inclusion of women and youth in peacebuilding.
"For too long, we have treated the inclusion of women and youth as a cosmetic exercise. A matter of token representation to satisfy a foreign checklist. Representation without economic power is meaningless," he said.
"When African women farm the land but cannot own it, peace cannot take root. When youth unemployment is so rampant that joining an armed syndicate or an extremist group becomes the only viable path to a livelihood, our security strategies can be said to have failed."
He stressed that empowering youth and women is not charity but a security imperative.
"We must stop viewing youth and women empowerment as charity. It is a hardline national security imperative."
Finally, he called for a redefinition of sovereignty from the perspective of ordinary Africans.
"Sovereignty is not a legal fiction defended in presidential palaces. Sovereignty is what the nomadic herder in the Liptako-Gourma corridor feels when he looks for protection. It is what the cross-border trader at Lake Chad faces. It is what a mother in Goma feels when she tucks her children in at night," he said.
"If the state is absent from their lives or if it shows up only as an extortionist checkpoint, someone else will fill that vacuum, whether a warlord, a terrorist recruiter or an external mercenary group. Sovereignty must be built from the ground up."