Germany, Nigeria to deepen cooperation in economy, migration

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul described Nigeria as a key partner of Berlin in Africa. "We just want to deepen our cooperation," he said after talks with his Nigerian counterpart, Yusuf Tuggar, on Thursday.

"For both the European Union and Germany, the African continent is the continent of the future," Wadephul added.

There are "an incredible number of opportunities" to expand the economic cooperation with African countries, said the German minister, citing the example of rare earths, abundant in many parts of Africa.

Wadephul said that he wanted to encourage the German private sector to become more involved in Nigeria and used car manufacturer Volkswagen as a positive example of this.

Wadephul also highlighted the issue migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea and heading to Europe, specifically Germany.

"We have with Nigeria an ideal partner to discuss how we can tackle this problem. We agreed to cooperate very closely," he added.

'Nigeria is blessed with critical minerals'

Meanwhile, Tuggar emphasized that Nigeria is already Germany's second largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Nigerian minister held out the prospect of intensifying trade relations, particularly in critical raw materials. "Nigeria is blessed with a lot of critical minerals," he said.

Tuggar also announced closer cooperation in energy sector, including on renewable energies, and labor migration.

With over 220 million inhabitants, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. "Projections show that by 2050 we'll have 400 million people," Tuggar said.

"What we are looking to do is not to export people but to export talent," he explained. "That's why we are looking to work with countries like Germany on structured solutions to job creation and to tackling the issues of irregular migration."

German-Nigerian relations

According to the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Berlin views Nigeria as a key player in promoting stability and democracy in the broader region, as well as a country with significant economic potential.

In December, German President Steinmeier visited Nigeria with a business delegation. The German-Nigerian Binational Commission, founded in 2011, has working groups in business, energy, politics, culture, and migration. The commission last met in 2021.

New impetus was injected into cultural relations by the return of the first Benin Bronzes to Nigeria by then Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in December 2022.

To combat terrorist threats, the German government is training and equipping Nigerian security forces and contributing to transnational stabilization projects.

Energy partnership

Nigeria is Germany's second-largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa. The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs has identified energy cooperation as a key focus area for bilateral economic relations.

The German-Nigerian Energy Partnership, established in 2008, expanded in 2021 in line with the German government's National Hydrogen Strategy with the opening of a hydrogen office in Abuja.

Priorities of development cooperation with Nigeria include sustainable economic development, vocational training, employment, rural development, expanding renewables, and healthcare.

By Dmytro Hubenko, DW

Video - Nigeria considers mandatory voting law

Lawmakers in Nigeria have proposed compulsory voting to tackle low turnout. With over 93 million registered voters, the country leads Africa in numbers, but only 27 percent showed up for the 2023 elections, the lowest turnout since 1999. Critics, however, warn that the bill could punish citizens rather than restore trust in democracy, citing deeper issues of insecurity and electoral distrust.

CGTN

Solar power producer Sun King targets triple growth in Nigeria

A Kenya-based solar power company is banking on using an $80 million loan from the World Bank’s private investment arm to meet its target of tripling sales in the world’s most electricity-deprived country within the next few years.

For nearly two decades, Sun King has sold solar-powered electronics to African households and small businesses with unreliable connections to grids, spreading full product payment over up to two years. Its kits are made in China and are now available in 11 African countries, including Nigeria where it has sold 2 million kits mostly within the last three years, founder and chief executive officer T. Patrick Walsh told Semafor.

Nigeria is where Sun King sees “the lowest rates of non-payment” for its products and is its fastest-growing market, Walsh said. Having concluded a deal this month for an $80 million loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and a Nigerian bank, the company plans to rapidly scale up.

“We are probably going to grow in Nigeria by at least a factor of 3 from where we are today,” Walsh told Semafor. Tanzania, Malawi, and Togo are other markets where Sun King expects growth to speed up, he said.

Despite its vast stores of natural gas, Nigeria has the highest number of electricity-deprived people of any country in the world, according to the World Bank and International Energy Agency. Sun King is aiming to reach the nearly 90 million Nigerians estimated to be without electricity.

Its operation relies on 9,000 agents whose job it is to physically reach potential customers living mostly outside of Lagos and the capital city Abuja. A network of 85 walk-in outlets act as touch points for after sales support.

The company is replicating a model that has served it in Kenya, where an estimated one in five households use a solar product. On a continent where more than half a billion people are without electricity — prompting international efforts like the Mission 300 agenda to provide 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa electricity access by 2030 — Walsh is convinced that “the pathway for people to get their first connection is through solar.”

Solar-based electricity remains a pricey proposition for many in Africa. The upfront cost of setting up panels, batteries, and an inverter to provide half-a-day of power for a Nigerian household can be up to $4,000, which could make the service out of reach for a minimum wage earner.

Sun King learned early that its services were “not going to scale without access to finance for the end customer,” its CEO said. Offering a payment plan spread over a year has made it easier for customers to buy products, but affordability remains the company’s “biggest challenge to getting these products out there,” he said.

Walsh believes they have produced evidence of demand and adoption to secure multimillion-dollar financing deals, like the one with the IFC. In 2021, the company received a $75 million loan to expand operations in Kenya from a group of lenders including South Africa’s Standard Bank, and British International Investment, the UK’s development financier.

The loans are denominated in the local currencies, naira and Kenyan shillings, in each case. It helps the company hedge against foreign exchange volatility that makes it unfavorable to fund local currency assets with foreign currency debt, said chief financial officer Krishna Swaroop.

“We cannot solve macro-economic instability, but local currency financing makes our business stable in order to continue working and expanding,” he said.

By Alexander Onukwue, Semafor

U.S. court dismisses $58 million Nigeria lawsuit in victory for Shell

Law firm Haynes Boone defended The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC), now known as Renaissance Africa Energy Company (RAEC), against a $58 million lawsuit, securing a complete dismissal in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Nigerian contractor Forstech Technical Nigeria Limited sued SPDC under the Alien Tort Claims Act (Case: 1:24-cv-07629), claiming SPDC owed over $58 million in processing fees related to a contract between Forstech and the Bayelsa State government.

The court dismissed the suit for lack of personal jurisdiction. The court found that the claims, which focused entirely on conduct in Nigeria, lacked a sufficient connection to New York to establish jurisdiction.

Haynes Boone Associate Rebecca Schwarz led the litigation team and crafted the successful motion to dismiss. Litigation Partner Michael Mazzone and Appellate Partner Mark Trachtenberg provided additional support.

“We’re proud to have secured a clean dismissal for our client,” Schwarz said. “The court's analysis reinforces important jurisdictional boundaries that prevent U.S. courts from becoming a forum for every international business dispute.”

World Oil

‘Difficult choices’: aid cuts threaten effort to reduce maternal deaths in Nigeria

At a UN-run antenatal clinic in a camp for people displaced by Boko Haram, the colours stand out like the bellies of the pregnant women. Abayas in neon green, dark brown and shades of yellow graze against the purple and white uniforms of nurses attending to them in the beige-orange halls of the maternal healthcare facility.

Within the clinic in Maiduguri in north-east Nigeria, midwives and nurses are handing out free emergency home delivery kits, “dignity kits” for sexual abuse survivors and reusable sanitary pads to curb exploitation of young girls who cannot afford them.

A dozen women sit on a mat in the corridor, awaiting the start of a session on reproductive health and doing their best to stay focused in the unwavering 42C heat. Among them is Yangana Mohammed, a smiling 32-year-old mother of seven who knits bama caps for a living.

“I like that the services are free,” she said, holding a yellow medical card while waiting to change her birth control implant. “I’m really glad for this clinic.”

Five years ago, when Mohammed fled jihadist violence in her home town of Gom, she had never heard of family planning. In Muna, a settlement with a couple of thousand residents, down from more than 17,000 at the peak of the insurgency, she found the clinic. It was suggested by her husband, a volunteer for the local vigilante group backed by the state in fighting jihadists, after her last delivery two years ago.

A kilometre away, Aisha, a 25-year-old mother of two, waits her turn at a state-run facility supported by Unicef. Her husband previously barred her from attending antenatal classes, worried that discussing an unborn child with outsiders could harm the foetus. But after losing so much blood in her last pregnancy that five bags had to be transfused into her veins, he quickly changed his mind.

Experts say more resources are needed to sustain such success stories in a region struggling with high maternal mortality, child marriage and female genital mutilation rates. UN global data for 2023, the most recent available, shows that Nigeria recorded 75,000 maternal deaths that year – nearly a third of the total worldwide.

Many of those cases are among north-east Nigeria’s estimated 45 million people. Ritgak Tilley-Gyado, an Abuja-based senior health specialist at the World Bank, said disparities were fuelled by inequities in health systems and socioeconomic and sociocultural status across the country.

“As a result, a woman in the north-east of the country is 10 times more likely to die from childbirth than her counterpart in the south-west … [with] a systems approach that tugs on the right levers, we can turn these abysmal numbers around and improve the wellbeing of mothers,” she said.

The rampant acute malnutrition in the region has worsened things, said Trond Jensen, the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) in Maiduguri.

“At many of [our] stabilisation centres for severely acute malnourished children, the mothers are very young … the risk of maternal mortality increases when you start having children very young and you have inadequate birth spacing, which then leads to complications,” he said.

Across the region, basic infrastructure has been strained or destroyed by a 15-year insurgency spearheaded by Boko Haram and its splinter group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s federal health budget can hardly match the scale of assistance needed: USAID contributions surpassed Nigeria’s federal allocations for health between 2022 and 2024. In many remote areas cut off by jihadist violence, there is little or no access to health services, forcing nonprofits to sometimes use helicopters to deliver emergency relief.

Aid workers are scrambling to deliver more successes with fewer resources.

For 2024, the UN’s humanitarian response plan of $927m was only half funded. There are fears about bigger funding gaps for this year’s plan since the dismantling of USAID, which paid for 60% of all humanitarian programmes in north-east Nigeria last year. Other donors including the UK, Germany and the Netherlands have also cut down their aid packages or are planning to, in the biggest reshaping of foreign aid in recent history.

“Unfortunately … that has meant that, for instance, 70% of health facilities that we are providing assistance through have been impacted,” said Jensen.

Some providers of humanitarian services are in a state of near panic about the approaching lean season – the period between harvests – which is usually from June to September.

“We have just short of 5 million people who are in need of food assistance … I think the latest estimate is that 23,000 children will be at risk of dying this lean season,” said Jensen, whose agency has begun rigorous cost-cutting and is asking donors to “fund our local partners directly, because that reduces transaction costs”.

“We have to make extremely difficult choices,” he said.

At the clinic, Mohammed has no idea of the behind-the-scenes struggle to keep the free services in place.

“From the knowledge the women here teach me, I pass on [advice about puberty and personal hygiene] to Hafsa, my 16-year-old daughter, who is like my friend,” says Mohammed, who hopes the clinic is around long enough for her daughter to use it.

By Eromo Egbejule, The Guardian