Nigeria: National Economic Council Inaugurated

Mohammadu Buhari

The President, Mohammadu Buhari inaugurated the National Economic Council led by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

The council which has the 36 state governors and the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria as members is saddled with the responsibility of advising the President on economic affairs of the country.

The President said since the task of ensuring growth, job creation and equity is enormous, leaders must initiate, commence and implement developmental processes by cultivating a culture of prudent management of resources at all levels of government. 

Our country is one and we who have the responsibility to run it must lead by example and as far as it is possible, there should be distance between politics and development programmes.
- President Mohammadu Buhari.

The president said, that from experience as a former Governor, neighbouring states should cooperate closely on developmental projects.

National Economic Council. June 2015

Africa Energy Gap and Opportunities

Africa’s energy systems are inefficient and inequitable. They generate high-cost electricity (around eight times the unit cost of countries in East Asia) through grids that mainly serve national elites. Africa’s rich get subsidized energy. The poor get to collect firewood, burn bio-mass and purchase charcoal.

Today, Africa has an opportunity to skip the carbon-intensive energy pathway followed by rich countries and emerging countries. Renewable technologies provide a low-cost alternative – and Africa has an abundance of renewable assets in the form of solar power, wind and rivers. However, current investment plans and energy policies have set the region on a high-carbon pathway of dependence on coal and oil. Charting a new course will require a fundamental rethink in approaches to energy investment.

Energy systems in Africa are dominated by a ‘big-grid’ high-carbon infrastructure, fueled in many countries primarily by coal. Renewable energy could turn this model on its head. Wind farms and solar parks can provide decentralized or “off-grid” power directly to customers, reducing the load on congested transmission lines. Most of the financing used to build and maintain conventional systems is public – partly because regulatory policies, pricing and long planning horizons deter private investment. By contrast, renewable energy creates investment opportunities for small, medium-sized and large companies.

With the right policies in place, a low-carbon energy transition in Africa could act as a catalyst for poverty reduction. It will highlight the potential for delivering renewable energy to the 60 percent of Africans now living without access to modern energy. 

The region’s informal settlements, with their high population density, could provide a market for innovative renewable programmes that lower energy costs for households and support the development of small enterprises. The renewable sector could become a dynamic hub for creating jobs and developing skills. In the rural sector, renewable energy could reduce the labour burden on women who currently collect firewood, generate the electricity needed to support off-farm enterprises, and improve the quality of life. Schools and health centers could benefit from reliable, affordable energy.

 

African economies need energy to pursue industrialization and not all this energy can be clean. Policies are therefore needed to guide the transition from high- to low-carbon energy.

While Africa has a small carbon footprint, many practices across the region constitute a problem. Gas-flaring is a case in point: oil companies in sub-Saharan Africa flare an amount equivalent to half the continent’s power consumption.

 

 National legislation on flaring is routinely ignored by major oil companies, reflecting the indifference of governments. Deforestation and other land-use practices weaken the planet’s carbon-absorption capacity. Far more could be done through national action and international partnership to unlock triple wins for carbon mitigation, growth and poverty reduction through improved practices.

Currently, Africa’s energy systems combine restricted access with inefficiency and high levels of inequality. This costs jobs, undermines growth and locks millions of Africans into cycles of poverty and vulnerability.

Based on 2015 Africa Progress Report.

Energy: Business Opportunities in Africa

Climate Change Opportunities for Africa

2015 is a watershed moment for climate change. The Paris Climate Summit at the end of the year provides a focal point for international action. There is an expectation from Paris that developed countries, responsible for the lion’s share of the impact of climate change, will sign up to new targets to reduce emissions.

How can Africa draw on global support to develop forestry and land use practices that simultaneously benefit Africans and the global climate?

The signs are positive. The EU countries have committed to reducing emissions to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030. In New York in September 2014, world leaders converged around a long-term vision that recognizes that climate change is a defining issue of our times, and agreed on the need to reduce emissions and build resilience. They also agreed that climate action should be integral to, and not separate from, efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and promote sustainable development. 

Crucially, there is widespread commitment to limiting global temperature rises to less than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, and all countries have been called upon to take national actions consistent with this goal. There is also growing momentum behind the message that global emissions must peak before 2020 and dramatically reduce after that, towards climate neutrality in the second half of the 21st century.

Africa has had no option but to adapt to the unprecedented effects of climate change, and there are many stories of how communities have ensured their livelihoods through creative and innovative adaptation.

President Mohammadu Buhari    Nigeria

However, adaptation is not a transformation strategy and Africa cannot adapt indefinitely. With global temperatures set to rise further, the impacts of climate change may exceed African capability to remain ahead of the curve. Unless the international community acts swiftly to mitigate the effects of climate change, these threats could undo recent progress in improving lives across the continent.

The UN Summit on Climate Change saw far-reaching commitments, notably from the business community. No region has done less to drive climate change than Africa – but no region faces greater risks from its effects. The 2015 Climate Summit is the critical moment for containing the risks. Prospects for millions today, and for future generations, depend on international action and effective national policies.

Kofi Annan      African Progress Report

While Africa need to reflect on the wider agenda, several opportunities present themselves. The run-up to the Paris summit is an obvious focal point.

Rich countries have emitted the lion’s share of greenhouse gases to date while Africa finds itself in a unique position: no region faces greater risks from the effects of climate change, yet Africa accounts for only 3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But if African countries seriously commit themselves now to renewable energy sources, such as hydro, geothermal and solar power, they could leapfrog as they have with mobile telephony – to bypass dependence on high-carbon fuels, influencing the world’s clean technology innovations as they do so.

The necessary transformations in energy, agriculture and climate change adaptation will only happen if Africa receives much more international financial support, mobilizes more domestic finance and repairs its financial architecture to attract more private investors.

African countries should prioritise development and increasing access to energy, then follow a process of using renewables to diversify and decarbonise the energy supply.

Women’s rights and needs should be at the core of an African approach to a global climate deal. Women carry a huge burden in African society and economic life: they form the majority of

smallholder farmers and carry primary responsibility for providing nourishment and childcare. This means they are affected most by climate change.

Climate change as an issue has very low visibility in many African countries, and that there is a lot of work to do to increase public awareness of the need for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

African climate change strategy should also seek to plug the continent’s large energy deficit. This deficit imposes huge costs on people, communities and economies. Two-thirds of Africans still have no access to electricity. Some 750 million people rely on biomass for their energy needs. This contributes to the deaths of 600,000 Africans a year from household air pollution, most of them women and children.

Based on the 2015 African Progress Report.

They have hijacked our change, again - Pat Utomi

 

It may sound naïve, especially for a person who is obviously a partisan, but my concern and alarm have little to do with who won or lost in the National Assembly leadership elections palaver. Easy as this can be lost on the gladiators, we could be collectively sabotaging the poor ordinary people of Nigeria desperate for change.

 Could this elite which has consistently failed to find its mission and do for its people what their old classmates in schools in the United States and the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the West, have done for their people in Asia and Latin America, unwittingly miss this window built on a change mantra, and betray another generation? It was with this spirit of wondering how easily we chase power, unmindful of purpose that I exclaimed on seeing the political bloodletting in the National Assembly leadership selection. My reaction was, Oh my God, not again! With the process and outcome clearly signalling disunity, lack of discipline and weak goal-setting, and severe goal displacement, the least impact would be challenged implementation of what the people voted for.

Oh no! It’s not happening again. Not again in my life time! But it was happening. The sense of déjà vu was not just troubling, and evidently palpable, it had a puzzling force that left you feeling and wondering how this is possible; the way you feel when a 747 or an A380 is tossed around by mere wind in clear air turbulence. The vote for change had run into turbulence at the inauguration of the National Assembly. It was not about who won or who the battle was against. It was about a public brawl and the change agenda.

It was about the ordinary people who had persevered so much in the face of underperforming and uncaring governments beholden to special interests and so seemingly unable, or unwilling, to go where less endowed rivals in other parts of the world have gone, and dramatically improved the lot of the people. To drive a change agenda for which the people voted in April, legislative common purpose was a clear imperative. To go to legislative inauguration without party discipline and with a fractious mode and the old ways, of, money and personality politics in top flight, was to betray the voters of this country, and that is what June 9 means to me. Hope has again been annulled and for the third time in my life a costly battle for change has again been hijacked. As 1993 and 1999, so seems to have gone 2015, if the people do not fight back.

I was lamenting these things when someone called my attention to an advertised full page opinion by some concerned APC members in the Daily Trust Newspaper of June 9. That advert was so reminiscent of the kinds of advertisements published in 1993/94 by the Concerned Professionals that I did exactly the same thing I did in 1993.

In that year, many of us had canvassed a change agenda. The Social Democratic Party and its torch- bearer, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, had come to symbolise that change. Two days after that historic vote, I journeyed to the US to attend a convention. It was at that convention that a Ugandan delegate came up to me, very angry, saying: “You Nigerians, you Nigerians, whenever Africa is set for progress, you drag us back.” I was not sure what he was talking about, but that was how I learnt of the annulment of the June 12 election. I immediately packed my stuff and went up to my room and began writing an OPED piece that would appear under the title, “We Must Say Never Again.” That piece resulted in the founding of the Concerned Professionals. That body acquitted itself well in the struggle against military rule. It was a principle-based struggle. They may have sent policemen to beat us up as we protested and sent assassins after a few like myself but the principle was not lost on them.

When Sani Abacha passed and they withdrew under pressure, we erred in thinking our work was done. The politics of the last 16 years that followed left Nigerians so exasperated that they jumped on the Change mantra. So uplifted were they with the outcome that they assumed their world would change dramatically come May 29. Such was the expectations that analysts worried the expectations were unrealistic and bordered on expecting miracles.

Then comes June 9. For days before the votes for the National Assembly leaders, I kept saying that for me, it was not about a particular candidate but about a process that shows party discipline and national consensus around an agenda for change. If the process gets fractured, I had warned what will happen will include a return to the old ways of vote buying in which goals of the common good are traded off in the old goal displacement ways, for money and self-interest. Then there is the loss of speed on consensus critical for change legislation. My song was clearly a borrowed verse from the US President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed: It is better for all to be inside the house pissing out, than for some to be outside the house pissing in.

It is easy to see it as a simple political game if you miss the cost of these simple games for why Nigeria is poor and our society is marked by much disharmony. You may then analyse the New PDP vs other groups in the All Progressives Congress, or checking certain power blocs. Even many of the actors who presume to be acting in self-interest have embraced a narcissism that has blinded them to their own long term self-interest, as they embrace short term personal gain. Because of this the “only business in town”, politics, manages to do continuous damage to the real sector businesses which give life to a majority of the people. But to the short sighted, it does not matter, this is politics. So, my view was, sort these things out, whether in smoke filled rooms, or in a sanctuary of truth and love for the suffering poor of this endowed society. The signalling from a public brawl that will bruise egos and carve cleavages into the polity and etch animosities into the relationships even in intra-party affairs may create momentary victories but they have a sad way of amounting to pyrrhic victories and delaying the reclaiming of the promise of Nigeria.

With mountain high challenges in the economy, trailed by an unemployment time bomb, security problems that go beyond the Boko Haram and kidnappings, and electricity and petroleum sectors, in much need for reforms, even as corruption, failing education and health care make us a tribe of refugees around the planet, now was not the time for politics as usual.

I have tired of worrying about raw political power, quest for possessions and quick inclination to predation (The 3Ps) muzzling Purpose, to prevent progress, in Nigeria. June 9 brought it home again. There could be merit in the pocket wars and persons that were the target of breaching the consensus for change on that day, but the consequence will no doubt be progress deferred. The big losers, the people, the small mechanic who needs electric power for a job to earn the next meal, the farmer who remains in subsistence because poor infrastructure locks him out while public officials live like Lords off a wobbly state, to the truth and prescription the citizen typically go away forlorn for they swallow the lies of politics as usual. The only solution for me is people power. The people must say to a political class riding roughshod on their well-being: Enough is enough. People power must come to save the people recovering from the euphoria of a promise of change that seems deferred again.

What was the purpose of the vote for change? The purpose is an elite that for one generation failed a people and denied them the progress they deserve and desire, should change their way and bring progress to the greatest number of people. The patience had worn thin. Now, it is the people who must now take back their country anyway they see fit. They cannot watch as Singapore escapes Third World status, South Korea becomes one of the most knowledge-driven high income societies on earth and Brazil goes from potential to a top 10 economy in the world.

These countries found a patriotic elite at some point that sacrificed for progress. Since Nigeria has been repeatedly denied such by its elite, the people may have no choice but to rise up and save themselves. There were enough blame for June 9 to go around, from the APC hierarchy whose complicit role was put forward in the advert I referred to in the Daily Trust by some concerned APC members, to the PDP leadership whose business, no doubt, is to make the party in government uncomfortable but which must know that in decent societies a government must be allowed to settle in and not for legislators to collaborate with those across the Isle in ways that can be disruptive. Fortunately, it’s never too late to begin again.

Utomi, a political economist and Professor of Entrepreneurship, is founder of the Centre for Values in Leadership

Opinion http://www.nigerianeye.com