Nigeria Eyes $5bn African Energy Bank as Six Countries Mount Opposition
As African oil producers set to take a final decision on the plan to establish Africa's first energy bank, with an initial capital of $5 billion, opposition against Nigeria has continued to swell, with at least six countries on the continent opposing the country's bid for the location of the financial institution in Nigeria.
THISDAY learnt that six countries;
Ghana, Egypt, South Africa, Benin Republic, Cote d'Ivoire as well as Algeria are mounting a fierce resistance against Nigeria.
The countries, it was understood, have been lobbying the power brokers who will make the final resolution on where the headquarters of the bank will be situated.
The jostle by all the interested countries as to the location of the planned financial institution has raised a lot of dust, just as the number of interested countries has continued to grow.
Apart from the aforementioned countries, other nations that will be taking the decision at the end of this month include: Angola, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Niger Republic and Senegal, while Venezuela is an honorary member.
In the coming years, the bank is expected to be very critical to the survival of the oil and gas industry in Nigeria as well as those of other oil-producing nations in Africa as the West continues to withdraw funding for fossil fuels.
It's unclear how much Nigeria specifically needs to get its 38 billion barrels of oil reserves and 208 Trillion Cubic Feet (TCF) out of the ground, but the Secretary General of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Haitham al-Ghais, believes that a substantial investment of $14 trillion will be needed globally by 2045 to meet the escalating energy demand worldwide.
However, the African Petroleum Producers Association (APPO), led by Nigeria's Farouk Ibrahim, recently announced that by the end of March, a final decision as to where the organisation will be located will be taken.
To underscore the importance of the funding deficit in the sector, even with the presence of International Oil Companies (IOCs) in the country, the industry is still seriously underfunded in Nigeria.
Already, APPO has laid out the conditions to be met by any country that is interested before the headquarters of the energy bank can be located anywhere on the continent.
The National President, All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Mr. Kabir Ibrahim has stated that Nigeria's aspiration to attain food security would remain a wild goose chase until insecurity in food producing states of the country is addressed by the federal government.
Ibrahim said that the present administration must prioritise investments in safeguarding the lives of farmers who are being forced at gunpoints to pay certain amount of money before they could gain access to their farmlands.
In a chat with newsmen in Lagos, Ibrahim declared that tougher times await the country as far as food production is concerned and warned that prices of food would continue to skyrocket if farmers continued to pay in order to get access to their farmlands.
He noted that the association has been inundated with series of complaints from local farmers, mostly from the North-east and
North-west part of the country about ransom payments to armed bandits before being allowed access to their farms either for planting or harvesting crops.
He stated that hunger and hardships would continue to be the order of the day in Nigeria if this obnoxious trend is not checkmated because Nigerian farmers have been overstretched and some of them are paying the ultimate price just to put foods on the tables for Nigerians.
Ibrahim said: “The government cannot say they are not privy to this information of ransom payments being made to armed bandits by local farmers as the association had written series of letters to all the concerned authorities in government and security services on this development and nothing is being done to protect the Nigerian farmers willing to go to the farms to harvest crops for sales and feed Nigerians from the hands of these armed bandits.”