Examination of Witnesses (Questions 103
- 119)
THURSDAY 16 JULY 2009
MR GARETH
THOMAS MP, MR
EAMON CASSIDY
AND MS
BEVERLEY WARMINGTON
Q103 Chairman: Good afternoon, Minister.
Eamon, good to see you again after our travels together. It is
nice to see you here in London. Perhaps formally for the record,
Minister, you could introduce the team.
Mr Thomas:
Eamon Cassidy is head of the DFID Nigeria programme and Beverley
Warmington heads up a number of our Africa programmes, including
having responsibility for our programme in Nigeria.
Q104 Chairman: First of all, Minister,
I appreciate it was out of your control and you were not able
to make the planned visit to Nigeria before this hearing. Do you
have a firm intention to make the visit and are you in a position
to give us any indication of when that might be?
Mr Thomas: I have firm intentions
to go Nigeria but I cannot give the Committee a sense of the date
yet. I hope soon.
Q105 Chairman: Obviously this is
the last formal evidence session and we appreciate that it was
not anything you had control over. In a sense, it is perhaps unfortunate
from your point of view.
Mr Thomas: It certainly is unfortunate.
Q106 Chairman: I am sure when you
do go you will have as interesting a visit as we did and you will
be very well supported. Perhaps I can put on the record that we
very much appreciated the work that you, Eamon, and your team
put in, because you did make the visit extremely busy but very
constructive and worthwhile. We learned an awful lot which is
why we have such a huge number of questions. We discussed during
our visit the Country Partnership Strategy with the World Bank
and the idea of operating in lead states, those that were described
as well performing, but I think that was defined as having a governance
scenario that you could work with. Obviously what comes up in
that is the problem that you leave out the states that are worst
run and have the worst problems. Is that approach likely to change?
Is it likely either to end or are you likely to move into a different
mode, a different mix, as the strategy moves forward?
Mr Thomas: I think the general
strategy of picking a number of states in which to work at a deep
level will continue. As you will I am sure be aware from your
visit and from the evidence that we have submitted, although we
work in four states in a deep and significant way, our aid programme
touches a much larger number of states—indeed 21 of the
36 states—and some of our programmes, for example those
on health, are determined as much by where the highest prevalence
of particular challenges are as by whether or not we have a deep
level of engagement. In general I expect the strategy to stay
the same. Obviously we will talk to our partners through the CPS
process and to government, both at ministerial level and at Eamon's
level, with the National Planning Commission with whom we identified
initially which states we would work in. I gave the indication
of the fact that we work in a broader range of states as well.
Often we have been asked to extend particular programmes that
we have had in a number of states into a broader range of states.
I think for example of our work with the police where we were
again working with a smaller number of states. The government
wanted to extend that and our programme has allowed us to do that.
Q107 Chairman: That being the case,
in the conversation we had with the Federal Government they obviously
took a somewhat different view. We had mixed views but obviously
some of them were saying, "Well, we really need you to engage
with the poorer states." I think that raises two issues.
One is, given the objective of the Paris Declaration and other
coordination agreements, is there a danger of us deciding the
programme rather than the government of Nigeria having leadership
and ownership of the programme, accepting that some of them understood
that it is a very big country and if you spread too thinly you
cannot achieve? Nevertheless, I think they were looking for a
slightly different approach from the way the British Government
is approaching it.
Mr Thomas: Across DFID in general
we would want to see our way of doing business as being about
a partnership. We recognise that we have particular strength that
we can bring to a discussion with any government and that there
are some areas where frankly we are not strong. We do have to
look at the areas where we have, if you like, a comparative advantage,
to use the jargon, and be honest with government about that discussion.
Where government has asked us to extend our programmes, we have
sought to be as helpful as we can be. Equally, at the same time,
we do have to recognise your point that if you spread yourself
too thin you start to lose your impact. Underpinning the choice
of states has been a desire to think through where we can have
most impact through the resources we bring. Some of the states—for
example Jigawa—are amongst the poorer states in Nigeria.
I do not think it is a fair characterisation to suggest that the
states we work in are necessarily the best states—for example,
those with best governance and the fewest problems. The states
we work in have very significant challenges.
Q108 Chairman: To be fair all the
states in Nigeria have significant challenges.
Mr Thomas: That is probably true.
We think the states we are working in have very particular challenges
in some cases. There is a process by which you can share with
governments if you are sensible the lessons you learn from where
you are working. Through the National Planning Commission we do
share our experiences with government. There is a fledgling governors'
network which again provides us with an opportunity to share best
practice and there are other fora that are potentially being developed,
a sort of nominal peer review mechanism, which may again provide
a way of providing further advice from our deep engagement states
more broadly.
Q109 Chairman: Do you think the Federal
Government can learn from DFID's experience and replicate? That
seems to me one of the benefits you get. If we are able to operate
in a number of states and show success in terms of defined targets,
does the Federal Government really have the capacity to learn
from that and say, "Right, we can now fly these with or without
DFID's help in other states" or with or without the partnership?
Mr Thomas: It is not even just
the Federal Government. Other states have looked at what DFID
is doing in some of their neighbours or elsewhere within Nigeria
and wanted to try and replicate some of the successes that we
have had. To give you an example from one state where we have
worked in terms of Lagos, where our support has helped the state
government to be able to triple its revenues, we are now beginning
to think through as a result of the question the Kano state—both
deep engagement states, I accept—and whether or not there
is work we can do with them similarly to replicate the successes
that there have been in Lagos.
Q110 Chairman: Has the new Country
Partnership Strategy been signed off by DFID? Is it finalised?
Is it agreed?
Mr Cassidy: It will be going to
the Bank board on the 28th.
Q111 Chairman: Is that the final
version?
Mr Cassidy: That is the final
version.
Q112 Chairman: Given that this is
now expanding it to include USAID and the African Development
Bank, what do you think will be the difference of adding those
two partners?
Mr Thomas: In terms of dramatic
changes, I do not think there will be dramatic changes because
we have been effectively cooperating informally with USAID for
some time and we have very close links with the African Development
Bank. What it does seek to do, if you like, is to formalise the
informal cooperation that there has been already. We are getting
better at sharing analysis together and thinking through where
each of us can work best and where each of our programmes are
making most difference. I think it will be a process of evolution
rather than revolution to perhaps offer up a trite phrase but
nevertheless an accurate phrase. I do not think there is going
to be dramatic change. It is more another step in a journey, if
you like.
Q113 Chairman: Is there any indication
of other donors not joining the partnership, working in any kind
of constructive conjunction with the partnership?
Mr Thomas: I do not know how much
chance you had to focus on health but we have an arrangement with
Norway who have I believe a £20 million or £25 million
programme of support in which they have located somebody in our
office working with us. That is another way in which another donor
is providing support.
Q114 Chairman: If DFID is partnering
with another donor in that way, you will obviously have a mind
to how it fits with the strategy so in a sense you can impose
those arrangements if they are working with you.
Mr Thomas: That is true. I think
the other donor that we would want to bring more formally in at
some stage is the EC. There has been a particular challenge around
the leadership of the EC delegation in Nigeria.
Q115 Chairman: That is why we did
not manage to meet them.
Mr Thomas: When that issue can
be resolved hopefully that will provide an opportunity for us
to see whether we can bring them into the network.
Chairman: It is a fundamental, practical
problem everywhere you go in Nigeria.
Q116 Mr Sharma: Whenever anybody
goes to Nigeria they realise that electricity is the main problem.
The supply is not enough there. How can DFID support the Federal
Government in reforming the power sector?
Mr Thomas: We have a programme
called the Nigeria Structural Advisory Facility which is working
with a series of government departments that focus on infrastructure,
power being one of those areas. Probably the biggest challenge
in terms of infrastructure in Nigeria is the lack of effective
project management capacity, so just people who have experience
at implementing and delivering programmes of support. One of the
things we are doing with the Ministry of Power is trying to build
their capacity to plan out the expansion of access to electricity
and then their ability to control the grid, the transmission,
distribution and the systems. It is that technical assistance,
the transfer of ideas and expertise, that we are seeking to offer
up to the Ministry of Power to help begin to tackle some of those
problems.
Q117 Mr Sharma: What would be a realistic
objective in terms of increasing supply from the grid?
Mr Thomas: I think it is a realistic
and achievable objective if you have in place the systems to make
that happen. Nigeria because of its history of military rule,
in which the systems that we would take for granted in the UK
to do budgeting and planning, to manage finances effectively,
simply were not there to the extent that we would recognise. You
have that huge legacy of a loss of effective civilian capacity
in key ministries of which power is just one very good example.
Part of the development challenge has been how do you build up
that capacity to manage things in a more effective way, to plan
for the long term to bring more access onto the grid. I do not
think it is something that the UK can do on its own. We have to
work with other donors and the political will has to be there
from not only the Federal Government but at state level.
Q118 Chairman: It is such a central
and obvious problem. In both Kano and Lagos we heard that businesses
were moving away out of Nigeria altogether because of the unreliability
of the power supply. If you cannot solve the electricity problem,
how are you going to solve the jobs and employment problem, which
I know Mr Battle will want to explore more deeply? Does DFID accept
that that is fairly central to a development strategy for Nigeria?
Mr Thomas: I am not going to suggest
that we can solve the problem overnight. I do think we can help
the Nigerians make progress and that is certainly what we are
seeking to do. There is a whole range of other challenges in terms
of creating economic growth and jobs, some of which are linked
to power but many are not purely linked to power generation. I
think there are other ways in which we can do this.
Q119 Mr Sharma: Primary health care
is near a state of collapse. What would you identify as the main
weaknesses of the system and how effective has DFID's PATHS[1]
programme been in addressing those weaknesses?
Mr Thomas: I think there would
be three particular problems that I would highlight in terms of
health care. Who does what is not clear in Nigeria in terms of
having responsibility for health. If you take the three different
levels of government in Nigeria, federal, state and more local
level, it is not clear who should do what in what circumstances
on health care. The funding streams behind that are often highly
complex as well as being inadequate in terms of levels of funding.
That would be one. Health workers are unequally distributed, so
planning out how you get the doctor in the rural area and in the
right urban area and the community health workers etc., to support
them is ineffective. As I alluded to in terms of your question
on power, those broader public sector issues about planning, budgeting
and holding people to account for how they spend money and how
they organise themselves, you have all of those challenges as
well. How successful have we been? I think we are beginning to
have some impact. We are working in four states and the intention
is to expand that to another two. It is about trying to help put
in place the public financial management systems to get more investment
in health care and frankly help to get a more sensible distribution
and allocation of those resources that are already there that
can be used to get those used more effectively.
1 DFID's health programme in Nigeria. Back
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