TheCable

President Faure Gnassingbe of Togo on Thursday said an estimated $7billion is being lost to piracy in Africa on a yearly basis.

Responding to a question at a joint press briefing with President Muhammadu Buhari during his visit to Nigeria on Thursday, Gnassingbe also said more than 40 per cent of fishing activities in the Gulf of Guinea were illegal.

He called for cooperation among African countries to tackle challenges confronting the continent.

“Piracy alone costs the Gulf of Guinea $7billion a year, that is what we lose for not combatting it and we also know that without cooperation you cannot combat piracy, but the first stage is to come together and talk,” he said.

“If all the African countries are on the same page, it would be easy to tackle the security challenges, so we have to keep holding summits, because individual countries cannot combat piracy effectively without cooperation.

“If you try to fight them in Togo, they go to the next country, then you don’t have the mechanism to go into the other countries. so summits are necessary, they are not even sufficient.”

He disclosed that his visit was meant to invite his Nigerian counterpart to a maritime summit which would hold in his country in November.