Some were severing like ants but they have to wait for a staff of the World Bank to take them up to the office the Nigerian delegation shared with other African countries. Perhaps because of the tight schedule, the CBN Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi who usually spices up the briefing was absent. His voice of support for the minister was missed.
What was discussed at the various inside the IMF/World Bank Group Annual Meetings?
Outside of finding out what is happening with the economics of the Globe and what precautions or actions we need to take as Nigerians, is the advice that the Bretten Woods Institutions are giving members and I think they was one or two key messages that came out of this meeting.
File Photo: International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director, Christine Lagarde (C) shakes hand with President Jonathan after their meeting with Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (R) in Abuja.
The first is that the IMF as well as the World Bank feels that the global environment is still quite uncertain, even though growth is recovering in the euro zone and in the U.S. But there is still some uncertainties. I think the growth projections have actually been revised down and I can give you the numbers, but what is worrying almost everybody is the two twin impasses that exist in the US.
The impasse over the budget that is the fiscal impasse in the US and the second is the impasse over the lifting of the debt ceiling for which a dead line will be reached this Thursday and if they do not resolve it. It means the US technically will default on its debt, which is not acceptable, and has never happened. This could create adverse movement in interest rates and other parameters within the world economy which could in fact trigger some serious consequences. Every delegate was more or less saying that it will be very helpful to the rest of the world if the US Congress and the Government could resolve this so as to remove the uncertainties that this is creating in the global market.
What are the institutions saying of emerging economies?
Against this picture however, the emerging market countries have also seen slowed growth. Several of them like India have seen growth up to five per cent, Brazil, South Africa they have all seen slower growth. The low income countries are growing robustly and in Africa as you know they are predicting more than five per cent growth for the continent. I think the key issues that that were analyzed are that what could be the vulnerabilities, what are the interconnections, what could be the spillover effect as the economists call them from all this uncertainties. Also of the emerging markets what does this mean to them. These are some of the issues that were talked about
Any suggestions on what countries should do?
More importantly what do countries need to do to protect themselves from these uncertainties? Their advice for countries such as ours is to build buffer strongly which means you should build up your reserves, put aside some savings because you do not know what else is going to happen, manage your expenditures better to protect yourself in case the world should slip back into a recession or other adverse consequences could occur because of these uncertainties. Those are the kind of things that we learned here for us specifically in terms of our macro economics management. Those are the things we have to take into account.
What is Nigeria delegation taking home from the meetings?
Now for Nigeria in addition to hearing this advise, we also heard some very good news and that good news came on two fronts the World Bank Group, that is the World Bank IFC arm through the World Bank President has made known that they want Nigeria to be one of the focus country in Sub-Saharan Africa for their efforts on infrastructure development particularly power which means they are willing to work with Nigeria to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.
They have a lending programme of about 100 billion dollars a year but they are willing to use that to pull in more resources from the US through the power Africa initiative from the private sector using the office of IFC to help us address infrastructure problem. So the World Bank is planning to set up infrastructure facilities unit that has just been put together and been talked about and they also said that when this is done, Nigeria will be one of the first countries they will like to be a beneficiary of this giving its large size infrastructure needs.
Which sector are they focusing on?
They want to concentrate on power, as I said and they are already actively working with several private sector power companies that want to invest in Nigeria. They are also promising to give us another seven hundred million dollar in guarantees for the power sector, IBRD guarantees as well as willingness to invest 700 million dollars in transmission.
Are they interested in the power sector only?
We also discuss with them a social safety net issues. We discuss with them how to improve employment creation, how to help those at the bottom end of the ladder who may not even benefit from jobs and they are planning a social safety net programnme of about 400 million dollars which they are going to prepare with us, it is actually called social safety net programme which will support some ongoing work that we are doing like saving one million lives programme, that helps with maternal mortality.
There is conditional cash transfers to help improve maternal and infant mortality ratios, train health workers, train mid-wive’s to deliver this services and to improve the nutrition, children immunisation, HIV Aids and malaria. They want to assist with the health related issues and also to provide a source of income at the bottom end of the ladder, they have put aside some money for that.
We also got pledges to help with our statistics. I think the chief statistician is ready to help us improve our statistics. On a general note we got a lot of commendation for the agenda budgeting programme that Mr. President launched in 2013 budget. We had another high level meeting looking at women empowerment and Nigeria got a lot of praise for the effort the president has made in getting more women into the cabinet but most importantly, the concrete effort we are making in the budget with this Gender budgeting.
As you know, we have five pilot ministries, ministry of women affairs and our self’s are working with which we announced in last year’s budget that they integrate into their mainstream the goal of getting women empowered within their programmes. If they do so they will get additional budget and we set aside three billion naira as incentive for that.
This programme has gotten a lot of notice. The Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Communications and Technology, Ministry of Water Resources and Ministry of Works and Ministry of Health are all participating in this pledge and each one has pledged to meet the goal.
Works has pledged that they will get about 200 women, they plan to mainstream attention to women by training women contractors and sub contractors trying to make sure that some contracts are awarded to women owned businesses within the works ministry and training women contractors in both health, agriculture communication technology have come together to say that they will want to reach about 5 million women with mobile telephone that can allow them have an E-wallet system for their agriculture input, fertilizers and seeds.
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