Perspective

Ageing; the Japan Model

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By Samuel Oyejola

Japan experienced a baby boom in the 1950s after the World Wars due to high social expectation in a country that is technologically advanced. But at the moment  Japan is faced with  an ageing society. Ever proactive, its policies and enlightenment campaign is  helping  to cater for the ageing population and the elderly in the country.

Japan promoted the establishment of nursing homes and day-care facilities for the elderly and home health programmes and obviously moved the care of the elderly from the family to the state.

university-of-manitoba-center-on-ageing3

Dr. Emem Omokaro, Executive Director at the Dave Omokaro Foundation

The Japanese government introduced long-term care insurance. This insurance offers social care to those who are above the age of 64 on the basis of their needs alone. With this, older people in Japan have access to various range of institutional and community based services.  This is  a wholesome responsibility the government steps into despite the huge financial implications. A gratuitous compensation for the country’s men and women who have in one way or the other contributed to take the technological and economic advancement of Japan to the level it is today.

Adding up to this, the government encourages younger Japanese to accord respect and  dignity to the elderly both in public and private engagements. To this end despite the waning energy and the drop in their level of productivity some older Japanese continue to contribute to the economy of the country through agriculture with the aid of advance technology provided by the government.

The success story of the Japanese government is a model for the world especially for the African continent. Truth be told, the continent has age-long tradition of respect and care for the elderly. This tradition seems to wear out with time and trends. Presently in Nigeria, old citizens rarely enjoy attention and care of the younger generation and the government.

Although, there is the ministry in charge of social development both at  the federal and the state level focus is on women and the youth while the elders are miserably left in the cold.

To add to this unfortunate development, a  government policy that protects the elderly in the society is lacking. Ordinarily, banks, hospitals, bus-stops and in other public places,  serious attention are expected to be accorded to the elders. But  with the absence of policy base to enforce these  traditional and social obligation, older citizens are left to their fate.

Stakeholders agree  that senior citizens in Nigeria suffer from the micro, macro and the corporative levels of abuse. The micro level which is the basis is the abuse they get from their care givers through verbal abuse, emotional and financial and sometimes sexual abuses.

Also the second level where is the absence of communal supportive system that would remove them from isolation and depression which is a major threat to their well being is lacking and thirdly at the larger set up, there is lacking the institutional structures and regulatory framework and supportive  initiatives like social housing, transportation, health services delivery and social pension.

To create awareness on this, stakeholders met recently to find a way out of this and care for the elderly in the society. At the forum which was organized by a Non-governmental organization, Agewell Care Initiative, participants observed that senior citizens’  abuse is grossly acute.

“When all that is needed to take care of the older citizens are lacking, it becomes institutional abuse, institutional inadequacies and lacking of these  interventions have exposed the older persons to abuse,’’ Dr. Emem Omokaro, Executive Director at the Dave Omokaro Foundation,  told Time Nigeria.

Selling the success story of Japan to Nigeria and that  the younger generation must show respect and attention to the older ones;  these were lessons taken home from the discussion of the First Secretary and Head of Culture Section at the Embassy of Japan in Nigeria, Hideki Sakamoto, said in an interview  with Time Nigeria.

Ageing the Japan way is a fundamental model essential for adoption in Nigeria for all round development and continuous contribution to national productivity even at advance age.

   

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Time Nigeria is a general interest Magazine with its headquarters in Abuja, the nation’s Capital.
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This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. 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The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. 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It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. 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