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

Ikechukwu Eze, special adviser to former President Goodluck Jonathan, in a statement  in Abuja, said the dialogue would also attract global development experts.

According to Mr Eze, leaders also expected to attend the event are Mr Jonathan and Kadré Ouédraogo, the former prime minister of Burkina Faso and former president of the Commission of the Economic Community of West African States. Others are the current president of the ECOWAS Commission, Omar Alieu Touray, as well as Matthew Kukah, the Catholic bishop of Sokoto Diocese.

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

The 2025 dialogue is the fourth in a series that began in 2021, when the foundation launched the annual discourse as a means of continually examining democratic governance in the sub-region, 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, as well as a former Vice Chancellor of the International University of East Africa in Uganda.

Mr Eze also stated that Mr 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, panelists, 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 Africa,” Mr Eze said.

(NAN)