EPA Review Annex Documents - DFID

which appear to have crowded out activities of other teams. One is the perception of the
generality of the stakeholders about the potential impact of the EPA on Nigeria’s
industrialisation, government revenue and the consequent trade relations between Nigeria, the
European Union and Nigeria’s other trading partners. The expected negative impacts have
certainly ensured stakeholders’ vigilance to the various issues being negotiated under the EPA.
This attentiveness, demonstrated by civil society organisations involvement in the negotiation
process (in the form of the creation of awareness about the EPA negotiations beyond
government officials among industry and farming as well as trading associations) provides
further explanation of the visibility and vigour demonstrated by the EPA negotiating team. This is
because it creates pressure on the government negotiating team to really ensure that it
understands fully the negotiating process, issues and implications and carry along non-state
actors. Hence, the team becomes not only relatively proactive, though in a limited sense, in
dealing with many of the negotiation issues but also it ensures that the process in Nigeria
assumes a bottom-up approach. Finally, the advisory and technical arms embedded in the EPA
negotiating structure are made up of seasoned national professionals and academics of high
integrity that have worked on trade and trade policy-related issues who are available to
interrogate proposals and perform technical analysis though on very short term basis.
Table 2 Composition of Members of the Technical Committee on EPA
Organisation Number present
Federal Ministry of Commerce and Industry 12 including the Chairperson
Nigeria Export Promotion Council 1
Nigeria Customs Service 2
Ministry of Finance 1
National Association of Nigerian Traders 4
National Bureau of Statistics 1
Nigeria Labour Congress 1
Standards Organization of Nigeria 1
National Association of Chambers of
1
Commerce,
(NACCIMA)
Industry and Agriculture
Others
Source: Minute of EPA Technical Committee meeting, 25 June 2009.
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The EPA team also boasts of an agglomeration of few numbers of lawyers and economists who
work together to analyse negotiation issues and examine their socio-economic implications
under mostly external funding support. Finally, perhaps because of the availability of external
resources and better access by the technical committee of EPA, more activities are generated
by seeking funding from available donor organisations which have formed part of the negotiating
strategies. The disadvantage of this however, is that in most cases the funding arrives very late
and this negatively affects the effective use of recommendations, apart from the fact that results
of studies are also made available to these external funders who also constitute the opposing
side in the negotiations. Therefore, negotiating strategies are known and responses are
predetermined at the negotiation table. As can be gathered from the composition of the EPA
Technical Committee, no academician is included, but mostly civil servants and business
membership organizations (BMOs). Academicians have been responsible for carrying out
studies needed to arrive at certain decisions, an example of which constitutes the study on the
selection of Nigeria’s sensitive products and on rules of origin. Apart from discussing the
negotiation issues based on their field and professional experience the civil servants’ role
ensures necessary updates of their ministry’s top echelon about the negotiations. This is to
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