DFID’s Programme in Nigeria

Lord Wharton of Yarm Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (James Wharton)]

I thank hon. Members for their contributions and the very broad range of issues that they raised. In particular, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), whose tour de force opening comments covered a broad range of subjects—I hope I have been able to note them down sufficiently to answer her questions. In line with her gentle suggestion, if I fail to address any of her questions, I would of course be delighted to enter into further correspondence or discussion with her, as indeed I always am.

I am going to do my very best to go through the broad range of issues that hon. Members have raised, but I am going to base my comments, in the first instance, on my hon. Friend’s excellent contribution. She asked some specific questions at the end, but also talked in informative and in-depth terms about the Committee’s report and the Government’s response. The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) spoke in his typically witty and engaging way, and said, in a politically carefully worded phrase, that the Government were partially in agreement. I think that is probably fair. To be partially in agreement is often that for which we should strive in this place. Were he and I to find ourselves completely in agreement, I suspect that either I would be wrong or he would be right—I am not sure which it would be.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire talked about power. I will start there, as the shadow Minister chose to end there. Power sector reform is crucial for Nigeria. I do not need to remind hon. Members that power supply can be a key perquisite for sustainable growth. I am sure they are aware that in early 2016 Nigeria’s power sector supplied an all-time record amount of power, but that since then disruption, and even terrorist activity in some cases, has impacted on its capacity. However, I am pleased to inform the House that supply levels are approaching those of early 2016.

We are clear that reform is needed. It is clear that significant investment is needed in Nigeria’s power system. Over 60% of Nigerians do not have grid connection, which holds back economic growth. Intermittent supply presents real challenges for those who wish for certainty and investment. Reform was necessary. The shadow Minister alluded to the involvement of the occasionally controversial Adam Smith International, which has had its fair share of coverage. We are reviewing some of our relationships with it.

It is important to recognise that there are pluses and minuses to all change. Along with the price increases that have come from privatisation and the removal of some of the artificial subsidy within the power system, fixed charges for those who do not use power have been removed, and the lowest volume users have been protected through reforms that have taken place. Much more needs to be done for the power sector in Nigeria. We need to build on the reforms we have seen and continue to review and improve on changes that have been made. The interest that hon. Members take is welcome.

We have had a wide-ranging discussion about the importance of education. The Girls’ Education Project, which is in phase 3 in Nigeria, is one of the programmes that DFID in the UK supports. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire recognised, it has seen reform and improvement and is now an A-graded programme, having had some issues in the past. We are helping more than 23,000 girls to stay in education through small cash transfers, which we discussed in the previous debate and which was raised in particular by the shadow Minister. There is no doubt that a significant amount needs to be done and that education is important in driving change and ensuring that a country such as Nigeria can develop its way out of some of the challenges it faces.

The sixth question asked by my hon. Friend was about sustainable development goal 4, which was also raised by the hon. Members for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) and for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy). There is no doubt that there has been insufficient progress to date in Nigeria on education. Access increased by only 4% between 2003 and 2013, and the poorest are even less likely to complete schooling. That is why education is a real focus for DFID in Nigeria and why we have the programmes we have. However, it would be unrealistic not to recognise the scale of the challenge and the fact that more needs to be done and constant scrutiny is required. I welcome the work of the International Development Committee in that space.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The Minister will know that African countries committed quite a long time ago—I think it was in the early 2000s—in the so-called Abuja declaration to spend 15% of their budgets on health. Indeed, some of them, including Rwanda, have reached that target or are not far short of it. That commitment was made in Nigeria. Does he agree that it would be very welcome if a similar commitment were made by sub-Saharan African countries and other developing countries around the world to spend a specific amount of their budgets on education, which we have seen far less commitment on than health?

[James Wharton]

My hon. Friend makes a relevant and important observation. The long-term sustainability of education in countries such as Nigeria must be founded on Government support and investment. We want to see and encourage more of that. We can offer direct support, as we do now, for those who need to benefit from it. We can offer technical assistance and support in training teachers and establishing curricula. However, for long-term sustainability, domestic Government support is required. My hon. Friend’s suggestion deserves a good airing and consideration, and I suspect we have not heard the last of it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire mentioned the Chibok girls. That issue caught the attention and imagination, in the most dire of circumstances, of much of the broader global community. It has drawn attention to the terrible conflict in north-east Nigeria and the effect of Boko Haram not only there but in neighbouring countries. I will go on to talk about some of the challenges with the humanitarian response that is required, but specific questions have been asked about the girls by hon. Members, including the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow. One hundred and ninety-five of them remain to be released, which is a significant number. There are significant challenges in addressing that. Much of north-east Nigeria remains a challenging area in which to operate. Boko Haram is not yet defeated, although there are some signs of progress. The UK provides significant support in that work, including a recent commitment of a further £5 million in funding. We offer and indeed give training to the Nigerian armed forces; more than 20,000 personnel of the armed forces have now received training supported by the UK Government. We must continue to fight radical terrorism in all its guises. Today of all days, I do not need to remind right hon. and hon. Members of that or of the scale of the threat faced by so many people throughout the world. The Chibok girls are a stark and poignant reminder of the scale of the challenge that many countries face.

Many others are of course affected by the conflict in the north-east, Boko Haram and the other challenges there, but I am pleased that we are playing the role we are playing, even though I am not pleased that it has not been possible to make more progress. However, we will continue to focus our efforts in that area and to provide appropriate support that can make a difference in the medium and longer terms.

The humanitarian crisis is a significant one. About 5.1 million people face a severely difficult environment; they face food insecurity. If we take no action, we estimate that somewhere in the region of 90,000 children could die. That is a stark and worrying figure, and one with which the world and the global community must engage. Indeed, I am pleased to recognise that the global community did engage at the recent conference in Oslo and has committed a significant contribution to the amount of funding that is needed: more than $400 million has been committed. More is needed, and we expect more to be committed in due course, but the $1 billion target has none the less not yet been reached.

The Government of Nigeria, however, have made their own commitment to spend $1 billion in the north-east. We recognise that that is a welcome announcement and that it gives the Government of Nigeria an opportunity to present themselves as a true world leader in this space, and Nigeria as a country that is serious about humanitarian issues and about tackling the problems it finds within its own borders. We must encourage them to do so, so their announcement is welcome. We look forward to working with them to ensure that the money materialises and is spent in the right way, so as to have the maximum beneficial impact that it can. I expect we will see further announcements on this over the weeks and months to come.

I thank those right hon. and hon. Members who have taken the time to meet me, whether one to one in recent weeks or at the drop-in session that I held with officials to brief interested Members of this House and the other place on the work of this Government, on the broader situation in north-east Nigeria and on the other famines throughout the globe, in particular in Africa, in what is set to be a very challenging year indeed.

The fifth question of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire was on strengthening joined-up working across UK Government Departments. In my eight or nine months at the Department for International Development, I have been pleasantly surprised by the extent to which that already takes place. I am keen to drive it further and I have regular discussions with my counterparts in the Department for International Trade and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and have had meetings with Ministers and officials at the Ministry of Defence, to discuss a broad range of issues across the portfolio that I oversee. That has included discussions about the situation in Nigeria. We need to continue to drive cross-Government collaboration, to break down silos and to make a reality of one HMG.

The truth is that, when people look at UK Government engagement, they do not see the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence or whatever it might be; they see the UK Government, the role they play in the world and the contribution that they can make. Together we can make a greater contribution than in our individual departmental parts. I recognise that. It is a message that I reinforce continually to the teams for which I am responsible in DFID. It is an area in which we are making significant progress but, following this debate, I will take the opportunity to continue to push it, because it is one in which we can always do more. The more we can do, the greater the net achievement will be.

Many hon. Members have spoken about health and health systems. I particularly recognise the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford on the importance of tackling malaria. I commend him for the work he does; he supports this area of debate and activity and the work of Government in this area in particular. He is aware of the Support to National Malaria Programme—SuNMaP—in which the UK Government are engaged in Nigeria. That £50 million contribution—the figures underline the importance of our work to tackle malaria on a global scale—aims to reduce the number of children who will die before their fifth birthday from 128 in every 1,000 to 80 in every 1,000 by 2022. Eighty is still far too high, but it underlines the significant threat that malaria in particular poses to so many of the world’s poorest children and to developing nations. It is a disease that we can beat and are committed to beating. I am pleased that this is an area in which, along with the UK’s part in the Global Fund, programmes such as SuNMaP are making such a significant contribution.

My hon. Friend also mentioned neglected tropical diseases—another very important point and one that is not lost on the Secretary of State, who is very keen to pursue further work in the area.

Our programme in Nigeria being our second largest bilateral programme in Africa, it is one in which I take a very keen interest as the responsible Minister. In recent weeks, I have had significant and in-depth discussions with our teams, including in Nigeria, going line by line and component by component through the programmes that DFID supports there and talking about our strategy for the future and where we need to go to have the maximum impact with the money that we spend.

The hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow, in particular, talked about the need for a strategy—the need to see where we can make a long-term difference. I can assure her that that message is not lost on me as the responsible Minister or on our team in country, with whom I have been having those discussions. We expect to see changes as a result of those discussions, but it would perhaps be premature for me to pre-empt now what they might be. However, she is absolutely right to say that we need a ruthless focus on value for money, on where we can make a difference and on the impact that we can have. We need to ensure that we identify those programmes that are working and those that could work better, either change or close programmes and then reinvest to ensure that we get the maximum impact we can.

We need to recognise that there are big challenges in countries such as Nigeria. Corruption, which was mentioned by several hon. Members, is a key cause of poverty and a key factor that can hold back development. It is not like me to disagree with the former Prime Minister about much—actually, in effect, I do not disagree with him about this—but corruption cannot, in any context, be fantastic. To be fantastically corrupt is to be terribly so. That, of course, is what he really meant, and the attention that he drew to the issue was welcome. We have significant programmes, including Anti-corruption in Nigeria—ACORN—and PERL, the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn, both of which engage with government structures and civil society groups, through which we are working both to empower people to tackle corruption when they see it, and to ensure that institutions have the tools to address it.

Several references were made to particular individuals and individual cases. With hon. Members’ permission, I will not talk about those cases, because many are live, but they make clear the point that we need to pursue corruption wherever it might hide, from the lowest to the highest levels, without fear or favour. We must always be alert to the risk that anti-corruption work will be focused on the political enemies of the people who control the direction of that work, and we are. We should be proud of what we do in this area. The work that we do to tackle corruption is an absolutely necessary and vital prerequisite for securing the long-term sustainable growth that we all want to see delivered and we all recognise Nigeria has the potential to secure.

Nigeria is a relatively affluent country in its region. It is blessed—or perhaps cursed—with significant natural resources. It accounts for about a quarter of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. It presents one of the greatest opportunities for growth and one of the greatest dangers of instability on that continent. We are right to be engaged there, we are right to play a key role given our historical ties and the country’s importance for the future, but we are also right to scrutinise what we do and to hold to account those who are responsible for it.

I therefore welcome the Committee’s work and thank hon. Members for their contributions and questions. I hope that I have addressed most of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire raised, but I know that she will take me up on any that I omitted to comment on. I look forward to continuing our work and the positive and constructive dialogue that we have had today as we all strive to improve life and realise the opportunities that exist for the people of Nigeria. Nigeria is a friendly and important nation that I hope we will continue to trade with, and I am confident that its economy will become further entwined with that of the UK as both nations develop and march forward into the world in a way that will deliver benefits for both our peoples.