The eggheads that manage the world's financial system gathered in Paris, the French capital, recently, for a summit that was seen as a new starting point towards a more comprehensive intergovernmental discussion and decision-making process. Experts claim, ostensibly, that it is a measure designed to tackle the impacts of climate change on vulnerable countries within the framework of the United Nations.
Putting aside the usual seemingly ineffective system that has encumbered efforts to address issues relating to climate change, the Paris Financing Pact Summit may, presumably, lead to a reform of the global financial architecture that will make it possible for nations to respond to the imperatives of combating and adapting to the challenge while taking better account of the "losses and damages" suffered by the most vulnerable countries.
The summit had in attendance Heads of State and Governments including Nigeria's President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and high-level representations from UN institutions, international financial institutions, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and private non state actors.
While we remain hopeful that the summit will find efficient solutions to reduce poverty and the adverse effects of climate change on the world's financial system, we are not oblivious of the usual hypocrisy of the Western countries, particularly, over issues concerning the third world especially Africa. Already and even before the summit ended, there were palpable concerns that rich countries were reluctant to engage with the Global South's key demands on debt relief and new financing for climate action.
For instance, the Cuban delegation captured the precarious situation succinctly when it posited that the third world, including Nigeria, has suffered mostly the nefarious consequences of the current international economic and financial order, which it described as profoundly unjust, undemocratic, speculative, exclusionary and, at the same time, placed massive burden on developing nations.
While it is good to participate on global summits of such significance, we believe that the outcomes should be for mutual interests and not to further turn the third world "into the laboratory of colonial formulas and renewed forms of domination that use the debt, the current international financial architecture and unilateral coercive measures to perpetuate underdevelopment and beef-up the coffers of a few at the expense of the third world."
It is pertinent to stress, in the opinion of this newspaper, that a new and just international financial order is of utmost urgency just as we believe that genuine reforms of the international financial institutions, both in terms of governance and representation as well as access to financing that respects legitimate interests of developing countries, must be given high premium.
We are persuaded by the inequalities in the subsisting world order to argue that there is a compelling need to establish mechanisms to measure progress in terms of sustainable development and, eventually establish more access to financial needs of the developing countries under favorable conditions and adequate technical support.
Without gainsaying it, climate change has altered the nature of development challenges. To that effect, therefore, a globally agreed climate agenda should be applied according to the principle of equity, responsibilities and respective capabilities.
It is disheartening, in our view, that the goal to mobilize $100 billion annually for climate finance up to the year 2020 has never been met despite all the conferences on climate change with the last one (COP27) hosted last year by Egypt.
Even at that, we believe that there is the need to strengthen the financial priorities of developing countries, which was captured by President Tinubu at the summit. Tinubu emphasized that Africa and the third world have more pressing social issues, which require elevated attention by world leaders just like they pay attention to environmental issues.
Similarly, the attention of the rich nations of the international community ought to be drawn to the severe financial and economic crisis that African countries found themselves in the aftermath of COVID-19 and the concomitant difficulties it generated such that public resources can no longer solve the problem. Thus, it becomes, largely, inescapable for there to be a concerted approach to tracking private capital to help Africa compete with others.
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However, regardless of the challenges African countries are confronted with, they owe themselves a duty to put in place measures that will make them compete as equals with the rest of the world. In the meantime, we welcome the idea of French President Emmanuel Macron to develop Net-Zero Data Public Utility (NZDPU) because it is an open free repository that will greatly help African countries.
It is worth pointing out that Nigeria gave life to the Climate Change Act in 2021 and then created the Climate Change Council that is now headed by the President himself if only to highlight the importance of the matter at stake. Nigeria also established a climate change fund and National Action Plan on climate change which clearly show the country's blueprint to the net zero target of 2060. Laudable as these policy positions are, we implore the government to implement it in a manner that will make it achieve the purpose for which it was put in place.
