By Desmond Tunde Coker
The Mano River Union has on Monday, October 3rd 2022 celebrated its 49th, year anniversary with the theme “Deepening the Culture of Peace.”
The Mano River Union (MRU) is an international association initially established between Liberia and Sierra Leone by the 3rd of October 1973 Mano River Declaration. It is named after the Mano River which begins in the Guinea highlands and forms a border between Liberia and Sierra Leone. On 25 October 1980, Guinea joined the union.
Speaking during a press conference at the MRU office in Freetown, the Secretary-General H.E. Amb. Medina Wesseh said that peace is a quintessential element and core variable which forms the theoretical underpin of many developmental initiatives, and holds true as self-evidence that ‘ without peace there can be no development’. Peace researchers have indicated that the condition for moving closer to peace or at-least not drifting closer to violence is to focus on the integration of human society especially in a community or a region with the same culture, and a long and proud history before colonialism, speaking the same languages and a high rate of inter-marriages, thus the case of the MRU sub-region.
As we are often reminded peace is a construct of the mind and not the absence of war.
She said that as a Secretariat, one of their core mandates is to promote the culture of peace and stability: “This mandate, as stipulated in our revised 15th Protocol, ensures that our sub-region remains stable. This mandate, as on Peace, Security, and Defense re-echoes my solemn vow as Secretary General to work assiduously towards the promotion of peaceful cohesion in our sub-region. We must review what affects a part affects the whole and it is the sum total of consanguinity of peace that we must focus, all our efforts to address current trends and tendencies.”
She added that the question the theme of this year’s celebration demands is, how we intend to ‘Deepen Education both the Culture of Peace’.
She suggested that there is a need for the promotion of Peace at schools and in our communities. “Peace Education is an effective tool to address the challenges posed by the use to present complexities of our region. In achieving this, a large segment of our population demographic shows we have a largely young population who must be subjected to a radically different education- one that does not glorify war but educates for peace, non-violence and regional cohesion. They need the skills and knowledge to create and nurture peace for their individual selves as well as for the communities, societies and all the various sub sets which make up the region they belong to.”
She acknowledged the need for the largely young population who may not have seen the actual war or were just too young to remember now, except the tik –tok version of the brutal civil war and political upheavals of the nearly 15 years of conflicts, that the sub region now enjoys harnessing more than two decades of peace.
According to Wesseh teaching the values of tolerance, understanding and respect for diversity must be adopted as part of the learning curriculum, rather than teaching conflict management and conflict resolutions.
She insisted that in order for us to ‘Deepen the Culture of Peace, there must be peace between human beings and their planet, which she emphasised is the true meaning of sustainable development.
She added that there is a symbiotic relationship between human beings and the environment, and understanding the challenges that are necessary to ensure the well-being of the earth’s ecosystem such that it can continue to meet the MRU’S present and future needs.
“We need to rediscover the wisdom of our indigenous people who have always respected and lived in harmony with nature. The trees, the forest, the rivers and all natural formations were respected by our older generations here now with us and those who have gone ahead. They had a reverence and respect for nature. Climate change is real and we must take drastic actions to make our sub region a part of the centre of solution to protect the planet and address climate change differently. We have together the third largest bio diversity forest cover in the world. A new carbon economy should begin to future in our governments and our curriculum as a new shift in our development paradigm in the sequestration, preservation, and conservation of our forests to help save our planet,” she noted.
She concluded by saying that the MRU could boast of Peace as a strong intangible part of its portfolio. Amongst the other hard and tangibles in and around the sub region she mentioned the following:
Interconnectivity, Roads, Programme, Ecosystems Conservation and Transboundary Water Resources Management, Regional Approach for Support to Artisanal and Small Scale Mining Governance, MRU Regional Renewable Energy and Clean Cooking Programme (RECC), Building Inclusive Business Ecosystem for Stabilization and Transformation in the Mano River Union – (BI-BEST), MRU Security Architecture: The Joint Border Security and Confidence Building Units – (JBSCBU), and MRU-UN systems partnership with a Joint program on community empowerment initiatives.