Ghanaian President, John Mahama, Nigeria’s ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, and many other African statesmen are expected to attend the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation 2025 Democracy Dialogue scheduled to hold in Accra, Ghana, on September 17.

The Special Adviser to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Mr Ikechukwu Eze, in a statement on Tuesday, said the dialogue would also attract global development experts.

According to Eze, distinguished leaders also expected at the event are former president Jonathan, and the former Prime Minister of Burkina Faso and former President of the Commission of the Economic Community of West African States, Kadré Ouédraogo.

Others are the current President of the ECOWAS Commission, Dr Omar Alieu Touray, as well as the Most Rev. Matthew Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese.

Eze said that this year’s dialogue with the theme, ‘Why Democracies Die’, would be co-hosted by the Foundation in collaboration with the Government of Ghana.

He said that the dialogue would give participants the opportunity to beam their searchlights on the progress, challenges and prospects of decades of democratic rule in the sub-region.

The event, according to Eze, will be chaired by Obasanjo while Kukah will serve as the keynote speaker.

The 2025 dialogue is the fourth in the series since 2021, when the foundation launched the annual discourse as a way of constantly interrogating democratic governance in the sub-region as a means of gauging its sustainability and impact on the lives of the people.

He recalled that the 2024 dialogue, which focused on purposeful education, featured Prof. Olubayi Olubayi, a seasoned educationist and Chief Academic Officer at Maarifa Education in Kenya and former Vice Chancellor of the International University of East Africa in Uganda.

Eze also recalled that Olubayi, in his keynote speech, made a strong case for African countries to establish highly selective merit-based institutions and elite research-intensive universities to serve as the anchors of functional education and drivers of technological growth.

“It is expected that the keynote speaker, Bishop Kukah, panellists and other resource persons at the 2025 dialogue would throw more light on what needs to be done to arrest the pattern of decline and gradual erosion of rules and norms which democracies have continued to experience in the Africa,” Eze said. (NAN)

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