Netanyahu to attend ECOWAS Summit in Liberia
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be attending
the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) annual summit of Heads
of State in the Liberian capital, Monrovia on Sunday, June 4.
Senior Media and Political Officer of the Embassy of Israel,
in a statement in Abuja, Tony Obiechina said, Netanyahu will be on a one-day
visit to Liberia to attend the summit.
Obiechina said that during the summit, Netanyahu is expected
to sign a joint declaration for greater cooperation with ECOWAS, the 15-state
regional body.
He said that Netanyahu has spearheaded intense efforts to
improve ties with Africa under the slogan “Israel is coming back to Africa, and
Africa is coming back to Israel.”
It will also be Netanyahu’s first trip outside Israel after
hosting President Donald Trump in Jerusalem.
The trip is the first for any Israeli leader to West Africa
since the late Prime Minister Golda Meir visited Nigeria in the 1960s.
The Prime Minister on 2016 toured East African.
Obiechina said that one of key goals of Netanyahu’s Africa
trip is to strengthen economic ties and boost Israel’s know-how specifically,
in the areas of water technology, agriculture, energy and cyber-security.
Israel’s relations with Africa go back to the 1950s barely
few years after it was created in 1948.
Others expected to attend include a high-level delegation
from the Moroccan government, a high-level delegation from the European Union,
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and the chairperson of the African Union
Commission, Moussa Faki, among others.
On the margins of the summit, Mano River Union States
(Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire) will launch the West Africa
Power Pool Project which will provide electricity to the countries within the
Mano River Union basin.
NAN also reports that it will be the first ECOWAS summit
held in Liberia in more than two decades. (NAN)
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