EPA Review Annex Documents - DFID

negotiation positions. The civil servants discuss the negotiation issues and ensure
necessary updates of the different Ministry’s top echelon used for later discussions at the
Federal Executive Council Meetings. The BMOs ensure that the interests of their members
are considered in any decision and insist on technical studies to highlight unclear negotiation
issues.
• The Ministry’s Department of Trade has 211 members of staff on its nominal roll and the EPA
negotiating team has eight, six of whom have basic degrees in social sciences and business
administration and two who have additional degree in law and one a higher degree in political
science. None have an economics degree. Therefore, a more qualified staff is required to be
involved in the negotiation of the EPA either through new employment or through temporary
redistribution of existing staff with training from the Trade Promotion and WTO sections.
• The average salary range of the members of staff of the Intra-Africa unit is between grade
levels 7 and 13. The EPA team does not have an external adviser on the EPA negotiations,
while it has just four external national consultants who get paid for conducting EPA-related
studies through donor funds.
• The Ministry requires a huge budget for negotiations in terms of capacity building,
workshops, carrying out negotiations related studies, travels for actual negotiations and
staying over in Brussels, Geneva or any of the West African countries that EPA negotiation
meeting is taking place, but it does not normally have a budget for EPA negotiations. The
only year that a N200 million budget was provided for EPA negotiation was in 2008 when the
negotiations gathered momentum but only N3 million ($20,000), representing 1.5% of
allocation was realised.
• There are about three capacity-building programmes per officer per year, in the WTO unit,
and most of the capacity building programmes related to this unit are mounted and
sponsored by the WTO while only a few ones are sponsored by the Ministry, representing
about 14.3% per year.
• In the Intra-Africa unit, there are about 0.933 capacity building programmes attended per
officer per year, and in a unit of eight staff, this translates to about eight aid and capacity
programme in all per year for the Intra-Africa unit with sponsorship split equally between the
ECOWAS and the Ministry representing a share of 43.8% each while WTO and EU
sponsorship account for 6.3% each.
• Training applies mostly to the Ministry officials and in few cases to the technical support
team, perhaps because they are perceived as experts in their own right.
Costs
• The number and cost of EPA negotiation related meetings attended by government officials
with the EC are those that involve travelling to Brussels to confer with the EC. These are four
in number and are quite few because the negotiations are designed to be undertaken at the
level of the ECOWAS Commission while Nigeria only attends as an observer.
• The ECOWAS Commission is mostly responsible for the passages of the negotiators
including the Nigerian participants.
• The total cost of attending EPA-related meetings by the Ministry Officials spent so far during
the period of negotiations between 2006 and 2009 is $56,420.8.
• The negotiators incentives for participating in the negotiations consist of the per diem paid
and the allowances that government pays for travelling usually referred to as daily travel
allowance (DTA). This allowance is not paid for EPA meetings since the ECOWAS
Commission will pay per diem rates to the officers.
• The cost calculated is the explicit costs that did not take account of the time that members of
staff spend travelling and the lost hours of work undone at the office during travel. The
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