The Minister of Environment, Balarabe Lawal, says Nigerian delegates at the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are not up to 25 percent of the 1,411 number in the registered participant lists.
Lawal spoke in an exclusive interview with Channels Television in Dubai on Monday.
Responding to the controversy surrounding the number of Nigerian delegates at the two-week summit, the minister said, “We didn’t even come with one-quarter of that. So many people mentioned are not even here.”
“If you look at some of the figures they have given for so many of the ministries and the Presidency, the figure is far below what they are talking about,” Lawal stated, adding that many of the Nigerian delegates in Dubai are from the private sector. “A number of people here are from the private sector,” he said.
With more than 97,000 participants attending the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Dubai, for the first time in COP history, every single delegate has been named in the participant lists.
Channels Television learnt that some countries allocated some of their party badges to non-government organisations, which can artificially inflate the size of their official delegation.
