COP28: Tinubu’s Hypocrisy On Climate Change

 By Olu Fasan

So, Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s new president, believes that climate change is a Nigerian problem after all. In fact, so much does he believe Nigeria has a climate-change problem that he led a delegation of 1,411 people to this year’s United Nations climate summit, COP28, which took place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from November 30 to December 12. Yet, just a few months ago, Tinubu was cynical and dismissive about climate-change mitigation in Nigeria.

*Tinubu with some members of the large Nigerian delegation to COP 28

In October last year, during the presidential election campaign, Tinubu spoke at the interactive session of the Arewa Joint Committee in Kaduna. Asked about climate change, he responded: “It’s a question of how you prevent a church rat from eating poisoned holy communion.” He then added: “We need to tell the West, if they don’t guarantee our finances, we are not going to comply with their climate change.”

Put simply, Tinubu was saying that being “poor”, Nigeria, “a church rat”, cannot stop burning fossil fuels, “holy communion”, to fuel its economy, even though the noxious fuels – coal, oil and gas – are “poisoned”, being the causes of climate change. He said Nigeria would only stop burning the deadly fossil fuels if the West gave it money. “If the West don’t guarantee our finances,” he threatened, “we are not going to comply with their climate change.”

Of course, the logic is flawed. First, a church rat that eats poisoned holy communion can die. Second, it’s harebrained to imply that tackling climate change is doing the West a favour because it’s “their climate change” as I wrote in a piece titled “Tinubu says climate change is the West’s problem, not Nigeria’s: How clever!” (Vanguard, October 7, 2022).

Truth is, no serious politician should speak frivolously about climate change, not with its devastating impacts through wildfires, heatwaves, floods, hurricanes, etc. Indeed, the African Union’s Nairobi Declaration says climate change is “the single biggest threat to all life on Earth”. In his speech at COP 26, the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, United Kingdom, Tinubu’s predecessor, President Muhammadu Buhari, said: “I do not think anyone in Nigeria needs persuading of the need for urgent action on the environment,” adding: “For Nigeria, climate change is not about the perils of tomorrow, but what’s happening today.”

However, now in power, Tinubu seems to have had an epiphany. He seems to have realised the unwisdom of playing politics with climate change. But how genuine is Tinubu’s Damascene conversion and how credible is his government’s commitment to tackling climate change? Alas, like many things Tinubu and his government have done, their approach to climate change is more about appearance and less about substance.

Take the 1,411-strong delegation, the third-largest. According to an analysis in CarbonBrief, Nigeria had the same number of delegates as China. Premium Times, the online newspaper, put the cost at N3billion. But Tinubu’s senior special assistant on media and publicity, Temitope Ajayi, defended the extravagance, saying: “As the biggest country in Africa, the biggest economy, it’s no-brainer that delegates from Nigeria will be more than any other country in Africa.” 

But he conveniently ignored the countervailing facts: Nigeria has the largest concentration of poor people in the world, making it “the poverty capital of the world”, and Nigeria’s per capita income, the measure of its prosperity, is, at $2,184, among the lowest in the world? Truth is, there was absolutely no rational justification for Nigeria to send the third-largest delegation to COP28. Absolutely none!

But leaving aside Nigeria’s mushrooming presence, what pledges did Tinubu’s government make at COP28? And how credible are the commitments? Climate change summits are nothing without credible pledges to end greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, one of the four pillars of COP28 was “fast-tracking a just, orderly and equitable energy transition”, and the main commitment is a global pledge “to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency by 2030.” Positively, Nigeria is one of the 130 countries that signed up to this pledge. Nigeria also pledged to end gas flaring and reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.

These are commendable undertakings. Yet, it’s worth noting that Nigeria has made pledges at every climate summit but has hardly kept any of them. For instance, at COP21 in Paris in 2015, Nigeria pledged to end gas flaring, but gas flaring continued unabated. Although section 104 of the Petroleum Industry Act 2021 prohibits gas flaring, it creates conditions, such as “emergency”, under which it’s permitted. So, gas flaring is not completely outlawed. 

Thus, the pledge to “end” gas flaring is meaningless. Indeed, Nigeria’s pledge to reduce methane emissions is dubious. Apart from gas flaring, methane emissions come from livestock breeding, particularly cattle, and waste landfills. With cows sometimes more valued than humans in Nigeria, can government create a stringent regime that ensures methane-free cattle-rearing? And is Nigeria really serious about tackling waste landfills. Yet, without modernising cattle-breeding and addressing waste, it’s hard to reduce methane emissions.

To date, the best thing Nigeria has done on climate change is the enactment of the Climate Change Act 2021, which commits the country to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions between 2050 and 2070. The act mirrors the UK’s pivotal Climate Change Act of 1998 and establishes the National Council on Climate Change. But unlike the UK’s act, which constrains inconsistent government actions, Nigeria’s Climate Change Act is subject to the vagaries of the Federal Government’s policy choices. With a government wedded to burning fossil fuels and paying lip service to energy efficiency and renewable energy, Nigeria will never have ambitious and credible climate goals, despite the act. Truth is, Tinubu still believes it’s difficult to “prevent the church rat from eating the poisoned holy communion.”

The Tinubu administration’s main interest in COP28 is the money it thinks it can get from the West. The loss and damage fund, set up at COP27 in Egypt last year, has attracted $700mn pledges from rich countries. Recently, Wale Edun, the Finance Minister, said that Nigeria was “targeting” the global climate change fund, and the government appeared excited that a Nigerian, Tariye Gbadegesi, is the new CEO of the Climate Investment Fund, based in the US. But if, as Tinubu threatened, Nigeria won’t tackle climate change unless the West “guarantees” its finances, it would get nothing from the West. Only credible climate change mitigation and adaptation commitments get international support, not hollow ones.

*Dr. Fasan is a commentator on public issues