By Onu Okorie

Director-General of the National Council on Climate Change NCCC, Dr Tenioye Majekodunmi, has warned that Nigeria’s drive to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 must not become a race to cut carbon emissions while millions of Nigerians remain without reliable and affordable energy.
She spoke on Tuesday in Abuja at a one-day Justice and Energy Transition Roundtable organised by the Yar’Adua Foundation with support from the Ford Foundation.
The NCCC director-general said Nigeria could not approach energy transition solely by asking how quickly it could move away from carbon-intensive energy.
Majekodunmi said the success of Nigeria’s energy transition should ultimately be measured by its impact on ordinary Nigerians, particularly in terms of improved energy access, job creation, investment and better living conditions for communities.
Instead, she said, the country must confront fundamental questions about what it was transitioning from, what it was transitioning to, who would finance the transformation and who would benefit from it.
“These questions are at the heart of climate justice,” she said.
Majekodunmi stressed that Nigeria’s climate policy must be aligned with the country’s development priorities, given its growing population, huge energy-access deficit, industrialisation needs and demand for employment opportunities.
“For Nigeria, climate action must enable development, not constrain it,” she said.
She explained that the energy transition should help expand energy access, create jobs, strengthen industries, improve productivity and raise living standards.
The NCCC chief warned that a transition could not be considered just if emissions declined while inequality increased.
She called for communities affected by climate change and economic transformation to have a meaningful voice in decisions that would shape their future.
According to her, social dialogue, skills development, reskilling and upskilling, decent green jobs, gender responsiveness, community participation and social inclusion must be integrated into the implementation of Nigeria’s energy-transition policies.
She also called for massive investment, noting that public resources alone would not be sufficient to finance the scale of transformation required.
Majekodunmi said Nigeria needed concessional climate finance, development finance, private capital, blended-finance instruments, technology transfer and stronger institutional capacity to achieve a successful transition.
She further advocated measurable results, saying the government and stakeholders must be able to demonstrate whether climate interventions were delivering the benefits promised to Nigerians.
The NCCC boss’s position was echoed by the Research and Policy Officer at the Africa Policy Research Institute, Olumide Onitekun, who warned that Nigeria could reproduce the inequalities associated with the fossil-fuel era if justice was not deliberately incorporated into emerging energy-transition programmes.
Speaking on a Niger Delta case study, Onitekun said the region continued to bear environmental and social costs arising from extractive activities.