Follow Us on Google
From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, has said that the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week is an oppourtunity to turn climate talks into real money and projects coming right after the COP meeting in Brazil. He disclosed that President Bola Tinubu will meet UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to sign a key trade deal.
Tuggar told reporters that the event helps make promises real. “The Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week happens in between the COP, you know we just had the COP in Brazil. So in between you need to concretize some of the agreements that have been reached, otherwise it just ends up being a talk shop. So events such as the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week provide the opportunity to extract certain tangible projects, commitments, funding that perhaps have been agreed,” he said.
According to him, Nigeria needs help getting projects ready to attract funds. “And in the case of Nigeria, we have a deficit in terms of project preparation. So this presents an opportunity to come with identified projects and try and source the funding from some of the countries and the organizations that are going to be in attendance. Last year Nigeria also participated at that previous event. Now some partnerships were engendered at that time.,” he said.
The minister speaking on the planned deals from the Tinubu-UAE meeting, said they plan to sign the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA). “We’re even taking it further because President Tinubu is going to have a bilateral with the President of the United Arab Emirates, His Highness Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and one of the things to be discussed there is the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, which is expected to be signed during that bilateral agreement,’ he said.
Other News
This deal, Tuggar said protects investors on both sides. He noted that while UAE businesses want it for safety in Nigeria. Nigerians in Dubai need it too. “So this sort of concretizes some of the discussions that have been going on and some of the investment opportunities because a lot of investors from the UAE side are saying they want that agreement to be signed so that they ensure their investments will be protected once it’s signed and they come in with the investments,” he explained. “On the Nigerian side, it also protects the investment of Nigerians. We have a lot of Nigerian businesses doing business in Dubai. Some actually even have factories and so forth. So this further protects them and it also dignifies the Nigerian. For us, we want to ensure that the dignity of Nigerians is upheld and Nigerians are respected wherever they go to invest, wherever they go to visit.”
The minister said the talks will focus on gas to fix power cuts, noting that Nigeria has lots of gas but needs more power plants. “So there’s gas. We’re looking to invest further in gas for electricity because we have a lot of gas and we need to ensure that we develop that gas to power electricity,” Tuggar said. “You can see that all these outages that we are encountering is partly to do with the fact that we had not invested enough in turning that gas to power. So now we have a lot of pipelines being constructed. We have even a licensing round going on for acreage. That means more businesses will invest further in exploration and then subsequently of course production.”
Other areas include farm goods, factories, and trade. Airline money issues are fixed now. “We’ve had challenges in the past with airline operators, their money being stuck and all of that. It was when President Tinubu came in that all of that was resolved,” he noted. “Now you can see that Nigerians are actually even traveling abroad and using their cards, their bank cards here. You can come and use it and there’s no restriction to say, oh no, there’s a limit. You can only spend $2,000 or something. So for business people it’s very important. But these sort of framework agreements further facilitate these things.”
The minister said President Tinubu will talk about Nigeria’s climate plans and how to get funding. “All I can tell you is that he (President Tinubu) is going to talk about Nigeria’s focus in terms of deliverables vis-a-vis climate change,” Tuggar said. “We’ve got our goals, we’ve got our commitments, our nationally determined contributions, and I said we’re looking to ensure that the projects that we have are bankable so that we can source funding for such projects. You have to package the projects that you want to execute in such a way that they convince the funders.”
He added: “And there are quite a number of global funds that are available, but for you to be able to access such funds you have to convince the funders that the projects are viable. So I’m sure he will be speaking to that as well as Nigeria’s position in the general global discourse on climate change and on sustainability, which is very important. It’s not just about averting climate change but doing it in such a way that it is sustainable.”
