Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) CEO Malam Mele Kyari has showered praise on the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project. It is “one of the most ambitious projects we have for an investment of more than 25 billion dollars. But more than anything, it will connect 11 West African countries to our gas sources, and in this way, we will create prosperity around Nigeria. You are creating peace around you and also creating a market for the enormous gas that we have. Ultimately, this gas will end up in Europe,” he said in an interview with Nigerian media.
This gas pipeline will indeed run along the West African coast from Nigeria, passing through Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Gambia, Senegal, and Mauritania to Morocco. It will be connected to the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline and therefore to the European gas network. This infrastructure will also supply the landlocked states of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.
On the financing of the site, Malam Mele Kyari reassures: “The world is ready to finance it. (…) Many financial institutions came around the table. By the way, the world needs gas and they will fund it.”
Mele Kyari has already announced, on April 6, that his company has decided to invest 12.5 billion dollars, in order to guarantee a 50% participation in the round table of the mega construction site. In October, the same official had promised “to make a final decision on the investment in 2023. Discussions around financing are underway,” he said in statements to the international press, but without disclosing the institutions interested for support the 5,600-kilometer long gas pipeline. “The project will be carried out in phases, the first of which should take three years and the others five years,” Kyari said at the time.
If Kyari covered the construction of the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline with praise, he ignored the Nigeria-Algeria (Trans-Saharan) pipeline project. An oversight that caused gnashing of teeth in Algeria. From Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt), the official Algerian press agency (APS), somewhat pinched, asked Monday, May 22 the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwumi Adesina, what he thinks of the project Trans-Saharan. “This gas pipeline is very important, it is an investment that we support and that the African Union supports,” he replied.
