Lucky Obukohwo, Reporting
President Bola Tinubu, was conspicuously missing in action in the live economic session at the ongoing summit of world leaders in Paris on Thursday.
Instead, he asked the country’s ambassador to represent him especially as Nigerians were told that he was in France to attend the summit and participate in a debate about Africa’s economic prospects.
The new global financing pact summit is a two-day event at Palais Brongniart in Paris, and organisers said it was aimed at finding efficient solutions to reduce poverty and the adverse effects of climate change on the world’s financial system which Tinubu was scheduled to join other participants on stage at 6:00 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. in Nigeria) on Thursday, with his aides saying he was fully prepared for the event as his first since becoming president on May 29.
However, at the appointed time, the Nigeria President was represented by the country Ambassador, Mallam Adamu Ahmed, who was on stage with David Craig, co-chair of the task force on nature-related financial disclosures (TNFD); Mark Carney of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), Mary Schapiro of global public policy at Bloomberg, Sabine Mauderer of the Network for Greening the Financial System; and United Nations special envoy Catherine Mckenna.
However, with a prepared speech, put together, Mr Ahmed said: “We believe we’ve more pressing social issues in Africa. The argument has been that world leaders should elevate social issues just like environmental issues.
” I must commend President Macron who has brought the issue of poverty to the table. This summit is about climate, people and diversity.
“The severe financial and economic crisis that African countries found themselves in after COVID-19 is all over.
” There are economic difficulties, and we’ve all realized that public resources would no longer solve the problem, we need to track private capital and for us to track the capital, and we need to compete with other countries around the world.
“It is no longer business as usual for African countries, we now need to join the discourse. We need to compete with the rest of the world. We welcome the idea of President Macron to develop Net-Zero Data Public Utility (NZDPU) because we feel it is an open free repository that will greatly help African countries.
“The message from the African continent is that, we are on board, we want to join the international community. We are now seeing movement from mere commitment to concrete transition plans.
“For example, in Nigeria, we enacted the Climate Change Act in 2021 which enables us to establish the Climate Change Council in which the president (Tinubu) is the head. It enables us to establish a climate change fund and National Action Plan on climate change which clearly reels our road map to the net zero target. We put our target to 2060 because we are aware of the enormous challenges we are confronting. We have tried to form regional partnerships as African countries.”
Truth Live News reports that the trip is Mr Tinubu’s first abroad since becoming Nigeria’s president on May 29. It was not immediately clear why he could not participate in the crucial aspect of the summit for which he left the country despite growing complaints about the biting effect of his decision to remove subsidies on petroleum products used by previous administrations to cushion economic hardships.
It was allege that before now, Mr Tinubu has for years used doctors in Paris as he continues to secretly manage serious health conditions. His aides denied that he would be seeing his doctor during this trip.
South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa was among several African leaders who participated on stage at the summit on Thursday evening.
Mr Tinubu’s failure to participate in today’s panel, which many see as unusual for such an event, mirrored his strategy during Nigeria’s presidential campaign.
As the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Mr Tinubu did not attend several televised debates held in Lagos and Abuja before the elections on February 25, 2023.
Similarly, during a trip to London in December 2022, where he was invited to speak by famed think-tank Chatham House, Mr Tinubu failed to adequately respond to complex questions. He repeatedly yielded the microphone to his coterie of surrogates, a controversial conduct which Chatham House also described as usual.