President of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Tuesday described the closure of the land border between Nigeria and the Republic of Benin as a big blow to regional integration.
Speaking for the first time since the Nigerian government closed its border with the Republic of Benin on August 20, Akufo-Addo said the move could negatively affect the regional integration agenda and appealed to the Nigerian Government to review the development.
The President made his position known at a meeting with a delegation from the First Bank of Nigeria at the Jubilee House in Accra.
According to him;
“We are about to enter a delicate period in the ECOWAS journey looking ahead of the possibility of a single currency and trying to forge greater integration among our economies and at the same time have important security and other issues which confront us.
“We have this business of the closure of the Benin Border, which seems to some people to be a big blow to the ECOWAS project”.
He argued that overall interest of member states should override individual national interest.
“I believe that there are other considerations that we have to look at and examine to find a way so that we can live in this region in harmony and allow each one of us our national ambition to be fulfilled,” he added.
