Kwame Asuah Takyi, the comptroller general of the Ghana Immigration Service, has urged the ECOWAS Heads of Immigration to "up their game" in order to successfully integrate their own immigration systems.
Additionally, he stated that the ECOWAS Heads of Immigration must work diligently to implement a regional visa (ECOWAS) for immigrants from other countries.
"This, when done, would facilitate the movement of investors towards the development of the sub-region," he added.
On Thursday, Mr. Takyi made a statement at the beginning of the seventh ECOWAS Heads of Immigration Meeting in Accra.
Procedures
At the conference, the design prototype of the ECOVISA will be presented for validation together with the report and a discussion of the policies and practises for the region's ECOVISA implementation and suggestions made at a discussion among professionals.
It has been emphasised to introduce the ECOVISA throughout the ECOWAS area as a stimulus to increase tourism and economic activity.
It is anticipated that the benefits of having a unified visa system across the ECOWAS region will help draw in foreign investment.
According to Mr. Takyi, it is unavoidable that member states have encountered difficulties in putting the ECOWAS Protocol on free movement within the subregion into practise.
He said that the ability of a single area has been hindered by the absence of harmonisation and coordination of national laws and policies among member nations.
Language barriers, disparate legal systems, a lack of a centralised database, problems with harassment, extortion, and corruption"
Following the opening ceremony of the Seventh ECOWAS Heads of Immigration Meeting in Accra, the Comptroller General of the Ghana Immigration Service engaged in conversation with Albert Siaw-Boateng, the ECOWAS Director for Free Movement of Persons and Migration (third from left). They are joined by Dominic Obetta Asogwa, the deputy comptroller general of the Nigerian Immigration Service, and Pascoal Benante, the chairman of the ECOWAS Heads of Immigration Meeting.
Issues
According to Mr. Takyi, national security is one of the top concerns for any state in the modern, fast-changing world, and it is each state's duty to safeguard its territory and people from both internal and foreign dangers.
He claimed that now that national security was a shared responsibility, ECOWAS needed to work towards successful coordination and collaboration via information sharing, collaborative training and awareness raising, and the development of human resources across all facets of immigration, counterterrorism, and transnational crimes, among others.
As the member states of the European Union have done by creating the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX), which is in charge of managing the external borders of the EU and Schengen-associated countries with unified controls within the European Union, it is time to integrate our various border management and control systems in order to achieve proper regional integration.
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