The Federal Government on Tuesday denied that it pledged $1billion in Oslo, the capital of Norway, for recharging of Lake Chad or humanitarian assistance to the region as being claimed by the UN Security Council.
Geoffrey Onyeama, the minister of foreign affairs, stated this on Tuesday in Abuja at a news conference on the visit of UNSC delegation to Nigeria.
The Security Council had on Monday called on Nigeria to scale up disbursement of $1 billion pledged in February at Oslo donor conference, advising the country to take the lead in disbursing her own pledge at the conference on the humanitarian assistance for Lake Chad region.
The minister however said that there was no pledge made by the Federal Government in that regard.
“There is no question of one billion dollar pledge that Nigeria has made in that respect and $1billion pledged for the Lake Chad is not correct. The sequence of the event is that there was a study to be done whether it was possible to recharge Lake Chad from the Central African Republic,” he explained.
According to him, “Some years ago the government put in five million dollars for the study to be done and it has been done, and that the study valued the recharging of Lake Chad at $15 billion.”
He also argued that since the government came into power, it has got other people to look at the study and there seems to be a lot of gaps in the study.
“We are now looking at having a comprehensive feasibility study carried out and that is going to cost about $15, so the minister of water resources and others are going to hold a kind of international donor conference to really start looking at what kind of financial support they can get, and because this is a huge sum of money, it is clearly something we cannot afford,” he said.
Onyeama said that Government may also be considering public private partnership arrangement in terms of mobilising resources for the project
“So we are moving in that direction but there is no question of $1 billion pledge that Nigeria has made in that respect,” he said.
