Stakeholders Brainstorm on Achieving Justice in Nigeria’s Energy Transition

• Want impacted persons at centre of discourse

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Stakeholders in Nigeria’s climate, energy, civil society and media sectors yesterday called for justice to be placed at the centre of the country’s energy transition, insisting that the move towards a lower-carbon economy must not come at the expense of energy access, jobs, economic growth and development.

The stakeholders spoke at the Justice and Energy Transition Roundtable in Abuja, organised by the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation with support from the Ford Foundation.

In her remarks, the Director General of the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC), Dr Tenioye Majekodunmi, said while Nigeria remained committed to the objectives of the Paris Agreement and its ambition to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060, the country’s transition must reflect its peculiar development realities.

Majekodunmi said Nigeria could not approach the transition by merely asking how quickly it could move away from carbon-intensive energy sources, but must also interrogate what it was transitioning from and to, who would pay for it and who would benefit.

“For Nigeria, climate action must enable development, not constrain it. It must help us expand energy access, create jobs, strengthen industries, improve productivity and raise living standards.

“Nigeria should not have to choose between development and decarbonisation, between energy security and climate ambition, or between economic growth and environmental responsibility. Our task is to bring these imperatives together,” she stated.

The NCCC boss noted that Nigeria was a rapidly growing country with significant energy-access needs, rising infrastructure demand and a young population requiring millions of economic opportunities.

She said the country’s energy transition could therefore not be separated from its broader development transition, stressing that government resources alone would be insufficient to finance the scale of transformation required.

According to her, Nigeria would require concessional climate finance, development finance, private capital, blended-finance instruments, technology transfer, capacity-building and stronger institutions.

Also, the Director General of the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, Amara Nwakpa, in his welcome remarks, said justice should be treated not merely as an outcome, but as a principle for designing and measuring the entire energy transition process.

Using the analogy of a plumb line, Nwakpa said justice should guide the transition from its beginning and help identify and correct mistakes as policies and projects were being developed.

He said the roundtable was intended to equip journalists with a justice lens for assessing Nigeria’s energy transition and reporting on whether policies and projects were serving affected communities.

Nwakpa added that Nigeria had an opportunity to deliberately incorporate justice into the emerging transition and avoid repeating mistakes associated with the fossil fuel industry, where justice was often treated as an afterthought.

Founder of the Women Environmental Protection Programme, Priscilla Achapka, said every energy policy, project and investment should be subjected to questions about who gained, who lost, who made decisions and who had access to revenues.

She said those questions would move justice from an appealing slogan to a practical standard for assessing budgets, tariffs, land, ownership, employment, safeguards, data and accountability.

Achapka stressed that the energy transition was fundamentally about people and not technology alone, identifying power, household, fiscal, industrial and community transitions as major transformations confronting Nigeria.

She argued that Nigeria was beginning its transition from a position of energy poverty, warning that the deployment of cleaner infrastructure did not automatically guarantee fair outcomes.

According to her, justice would only be experienced when energy was reliable, affordable and useful for cooking, studying, earning incomes, running clinics, preserving food and improving public safety.

In his presentation, the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Prime Business Africa, Dr Marcel Mbamalu, urged journalists covering the energy transition to interrogate official claims, scrutinise data and follow the money behind climate and energy projects.

Mbamalu said journalists should question the source of data, the assumptions behind emission-reduction claims and the baseline against which progress was measured.

He also urged reporters to look beyond government announcements and climate finance pledges, stressing that a pledge was not the same as a disbursement, while a disbursement did not automatically translate into a completed project.