EPA Review Annex Documents - DFID

ensure that they have foreknowledge of issues by the time Federal Executive Council Memos
are prepared by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry for discussions at the Federal Executive
Council Meetings. The BMOs role is strictly interest-related. They are in the Committee to
always ensure that the interests of their members are considered in any decision and, where
there is lack of understanding, to insist on technical studies to illuminate such lack of clarity of
issues.
The Ministry’s Department of Trade has 211 members of staff on its nominal roll. The EPA
negotiating team has only eight of these officials, six of whom have basic degrees in social
sciences and business administration and two of whom has additional degree in Law and one a
higher degree in political science. None has an economics degree 107 but all have been exposed
to different on-the-job training through short trade policy related workshops within and outside
the country, with some at the level of the WTO through the regional trade policy course mounted
for 3 months per year. The desk officer for EPA, an Assistant Chief Commercial Officer in the
Intra-Africa section, attended this training course in Nairobi in 2005. In view of the structure of
staff in the different sections, while the negotiations last, it appears that more staff is required to
be involved in the negotiation of the EPA either through new employment or through temporary
redistribution of existing staff from the Trade Promotion and WTO sections, which is the more
feasible option.
More detail of the Intra-Africa section which deal with the EPA negotiations is provided on Table
3. The average salary range of the members of staff of the Intra-Africa unit is between grade
levels seven and 13 while the departmental head who directs activities in the Trade department
is on grade level 17 and his deputy on grade level 16 (see Appendix Table 1). The EPA team
does not yet have an external adviser on the EPA negotiations, while it has four external
national consultants who do not receive any compensation except when they are involved in
conducting EPA-related studies that are paid for by donor organisations, mainly by DFID Nigeria
and to a little extent the ECOWAS Commission. Their travel costs and per diems are also
reimbursed by these organisations.
The part of the Ministry’s budget spent on trade negotiations is a more challenging task because
negotiations involved capacity building, workshops, carrying out negotiations related studies,
travels for actual negotiations and staying over in either Brussels, Geneva or any of the West
African countries that the EPA negotiation meeting would be taking place. All of these details
are not shown in the budget apart from a lump sum that makes reference to EPA negotiations.
The only year that a budget head was designed for EPA negotiation was in 2008 when the
negotiations gathered momentum. The EPA budget for 2008 was N200million but only N3million
(or about $20,000), representing 1.5% of allocation, was released and spent, this was induced
by the falling oil prices which ensured that budget performance fell well below expectation in
that year. This amount is clearly too little even for travelling of three experts only once.
Aid programmes and technical assistance programmes directed at the members of staff of the
Department of Trade relate to capacity building with regard to both the WTO and the EPA
negotiations. Table 4 indicates for those who responded in the WTO and Intra-Africa units the
types of training that have been attended and the sponsors. 108
107 The head of the department is an economics graduate.
108 The sample includes four officers in WTO unit and five officers in Intra-Africa unit. It was a difficult task
convincing respondent officers that this census of capacity building programmes was not meant to
redistribute the opportunity to attend, this suspicion pointing to uneven distribution of capacity
programmes among staff.
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