The mobilisation of capital for Africa’s climate challenge must necessarily be multifaceted – comprising local, global, and hybrid. In this regard, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) – whether at national, continental, and multilateral levels – have a duty to direct funding towards ESG-compliant entities, projects, and community resilience causes, especially those built on solid sovereign frameworks. Importantly, they have a responsibility, first of all, to demonstrate that sustainability is embedded in the core of their mandate delivery. In a previous piece, this page published a Sustainability Visibility Scan (SVS) on select DFIs in Nigeria. The scan, which focused on what is publicly communicated on the official websites of the agencies and not implied in media reporting or ad-hoc activities, revealed a “landscape of fragmented visibility, where some DFIs are taking tentative steps towards transparency, while others remain opaque in areas that matter most for climate, competitiveness, and public accountability.” The report featured analyses of the sustainability positioning of the Bank of Industry (BOI), Bank of Agriculture (BOA), Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) Plc, Nigeria Export-Import Bank (NEXIM), and the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN). This was six months ago. The question of what has changed since then is now engaging our researchers, who are taking a deeper dive into the substance of claims made and how those have determined the direction of climate finance flows to support broader economic growth beyond climate adaptation and resilience.
This question is relevant given the alarm raised by the African Development Bank (AfDB) this week that an imminent ‘super’ El Niño weather event could cost African countries up to $20 billion in public finance and force millions of people into displacement. Anthony Nyong, the bank’s Director for Climate Change and Green Growth, reportedly said countries affected could lose between 1 and 2 per cent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This projection is not far from a report by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) that Africa loses between 2 and 5 per cent of GDP each year to extreme weather events.
According to Nyong, Africa could need as much as $100 billion for adaptation funding if El Nino impacts as feared, adding that the AfDB would consider restructuring investments to help affected countries in the eventuality of the storm. Nigeria is one of the countries he mentioned, alongside Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Mali, and Burundi, that could suffer the adverse consequences of the weather event. It is time for the AfDB and other DFIs to pay closer attention to entities and ESG-readiness, measurement, and accountability.
Meta, X, Google, TikTok: Should Nigerian Netizens Be Worried for Freedom of Expression?
Last week, Nigeria’s Senate conducted a public hearing on two critical IT-related bills. One of the proposed legislations is to compel global technology giants and social media companies operating in Nigeria to establish physical offices in the country.
Sponsor of the bill, Ned Nwoko, argued that the move will strengthen national security, improve data protection, enhance regulatory oversight, and create jobs for the youths. Big tech companies like Meta, Google, TikTok, and X are clearly the target of this proposed law. There is nothing inherently wrong for these companies to maintain operational bases in Nigeria. The arguments of job creation, increased tax earnings, and data security are valid. But they are superficial and inchoate. Thousands of Nigerians, especially young persons, are already gainfully employed and engaged on these platforms without the need for offices and/or data centres in Nigeria. On taxes, didn’t the new tax law make provision for earnings from the digital (gig) economy and the vibrant online commerce which are run on those platforms? On the matter of ownership, can Nigeria (or any developing nation, for that matter) truly demand data sovereignty and security when even the government still have to depend on cloud infrastructure hosted in the US for data storage? For these reasons, many citizens see this bill as another covert plot by the Senate to restrict freedom of expression online. The right to freedom of speech is not negotiable.
