Africa is nothing if many of its leaders including President Muhammadu Buhari do not attend the Finance for Development Conference happening in Ethiopia from July 13 to 16, 2015. Though the continent has witnessed exceptional growth, we are still faced with the heavy burden of mobilising adequate resources to accelerate the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals and now the post-2015 development agenda including financing our infrastructure and growth needs.
Words alone will not make these goals a reality. We need money and the political will to deliver. The third Financing for Development Conference is our chance as a nation and continent to turn the ambitious development goals and climate agreements currently being discussed at the United Nations into reality.
The bold aim of the FfD Conference is an intergovernmentally negotiated and agreed outcome, which should constitute an important contribution to and support the implementation of the post-2015 development agenda.
Besides, the conference will attract high-level political representatives, including Heads of State and Government, and Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs and Development Cooperation, as well as all relevant institutional stakeholders, non-governmental organisations and business sector entities.
In times past, measure after measure had been rolled out seeking (in theory anyway) to bring sufficient and innovative sources of funding to finance the development and growth Africa so deserves. Yet, Africa with Nigeria leading the pack has yet to ably mobilise the financial and technical resources needed for its development since the Monterrey Consensus in March 2002.
An important step taken by the Heads of Government and Finance Ministers following the Monterrey Consensus in March 2002 is the 2008 Doha Declaration which recognised that mobilising financial resources for development and the effective use of all those resources were central to the global partnership for sustainable development followed in 2009 by a dialogue on the transformation of the international financial architecture in New York.
This is a uniquely important opportunity for Africa to negotiate how best its “future can be financed’’. Faced with a huge financial crisis, now is the time for Nigeria to lead other African countries in discussing and negotiating a financing plan and agreement that can help the continent in delivering the Africa “Africans want to see.”
Official development assistance and foreign direct investments cannot be relied upon as the main sources of funding for the ambitious goals and targets contained in the soon-to-be finalised post-2015 global development agenda. Mobilising domestic resources, clamping down on corruption and illicit financial flows and addressing issues surrounding good governance are some of the alternatives that must be explored.
Nigeria needs to lead the continent in important discussions and negotiations that need to happen around finding alternatives that are critical to the growth of our continent and opportunities from which we can raise internal resources such as through intra-Africa trade, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, foreign reserves and remittances, natural resources including our extractive industries amongst others.
We are sufficiently qualified to lead these discussions since as a country we have experience in all of these areas. Using this experience, President Buhari and other African leaders have a role to play in using the FfD Conference to negotiate viable continental finance alternatives and instruments that will help fund our development agenda from 2016 to 2030.
Oyebisi Babatunde Oluseyi,
Executive Director, Nigeria Network of NGOs, Lagos.
seyi@nnngo.org
Source: Punch
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