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Buhari Defends Position on EPA

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By Samuel Oyejola

 

Protecting the economy, the industries and small businesses that provide jobs for majority of Nigerians is the reason Nigeria is reluctant to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), President Buhari has revealed.

 

The President gave this revelation while receiving a Letter of Credence from the Head of Delegation of the European Union to Nigeria, His Excellency Ketil Iversen Karlsen in Abuja on Thursday.

 

He expressed fear that the EPA would expose the industries and small businesses to external pressures and competitions, which could lead to closures and job losses.

 

“We are not enthusiastic about signing the EPA because of our largely youthful population. We are still struggling to provide jobs for them, and we want our youths to be kept busy.

 

“Presently, our industries cannot compete with the more efficient and highly technologically driven industries in Europe. We have to protect our industries and our youths,’’ he said.

 

The President had in 2016 told the European Parliament that Nigeria would not sign the EPA because it would threaten the industrialization of the country.

 

The goal of the EPA according to the EU is to promote sustainable economic growth and development, reduce poverty in the region and gradual integration into the world economy, which would bolster regional economic integration.

 

President Buhari further explained that his insistent on probity, transparency and accountability in the public and private sectors is to secure the future of the country for all Nigerians, especially the youths.

 

The President said more than 60 percent of Nigerians fall into the age category of youths and deserve to inherit a stable and prosperous country that they can be proud of, adding that the government will work assiduously to prevent waste and the depletion of resources by corrupt Nigerians.

 

President Buhari, who commended the EU for its support for the rehabilitation of the North East, noted that the Nigerian economy was already being repositioned to attract more investments that will create jobs.

 

In his remarks, Karlsen said the EU will continue to support President Buhari’s administration in the key priorities it listed; security, economy and the fight against corruption.

 

He said the EPA was designed to accommodate and protect some economies that would find it difficult to compete.

 

“We are hopeful that there will be a signature on the agreement,’’ he added.

 

“The EPA seeks to push the ECOWAS region to open its market to EU goods and services faster and more substantially than goods and services from other regions. The situation would impose higher adjustment costs that must be borne over a much shorter time period, on the region than trade negotiations and import liberalization interests would suggest,” according to Chibuzo Nwoke of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs.

Nigeria is the only ECOWAS state that is yet to sign the agreement.

   

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  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. 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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Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. 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. 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