Achieving the SDGs: Where is Nigeria?

An assessment of the Millennium Development Goals in Africa, which began and ended between 2000 and 2015, showed abysmal outcomes for most countries. Nigeria was one of the main candidates that failed woefully. The Sustainable Development Goals, which succeeded the MDGs and commenced in 2015, will end in less than five years. Both MDGs and SDGs, the United Nations agenda, serve as a global development plan for developing countries, as these countries continue to struggle to provide basic needs for their citizens.

The MDGs were eight development targets agreed upon by 189 member countries of the UN in 2000, aimed largely to reduce extreme poverty, hunger, diseases, and income inequality, promote education, and environmental sustainability. Actually, the goal was to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by reducing by half the proportion of people living on less than US$1 a day. The second goal was concerned with ensuring that all children complete at least a full course of primary education. In addition, the third goal focused on achieving gender equality in education and, in particular, empowering girls.

Goals four, five, and six were concerned with issues relating to health and healthy living, while Goal seven has sustainable development as its theme, and the eighth goal tried to show that global cooperation or partnership was a necessary condition for the achievement of all the goals. Looking back just before the conclusion of the MDGs in 2015, it was clear that some countries were actually guided by the development agenda presented by the Goals, and the need to pursue the agenda further was imperative; thus, the introduction of the SDGs was an extension of the MDGs.

Of course, the failure of Nigeria to meet the Millennium Development Goals is apparent today, as we are still talking about a growing number of poverty-stricken citizens, a large number of children out of school, with girls more affected, growing mortality rates, and a resurgence of primary health issues that are globally forgotten. We are still grappling with discrete economic growth and looking forward to sustainable growth, which opens the door for economic development. Today, men are still squeezing out women from holding political positions, yet many girls are at the top of their classes in schools but are politically muscled out.

The politicians are sometimes naïve to think that Nigerians can be taken for granted. I need to say that the fact that the People Democratic Party, which planned to rule Nigeria for 60 years, was truncated with the termination of the MDGs in 2015 was not a coincidence. It was a deliberate verdict on failure to achieve the MDGs. The APC came in with the commencement of the SDGs. Will APC want Nigerians to terminate its governance too based on SDGs? Can Nigerians wait till the end of the programmes in 2030 before terminating APC rule? It is not a matter of God forbidding. The opportunity to prevent such things is getting slimmer. The APC government has concentrated more on enriching the selected few they think matter in the polity. How many of the goals of the SDGs have been achieved under the APC?

While the MDGs had eight development targets, the SDGs targets are 17 but encompass some aspects of the MDGs. Many African governments do not declare adoption of the goals for implementation as targets of development, but are working assiduously to achieve the goals, believing that therein lies the foundation for further economic development. Many others totally ignore the goals, but at their own peril.

The main aim of the SDGs is to end poverty globally, protect the planet (Earth) and ensure peace and prosperity for all citizens in all countries by 2030. There are 169 targets focusing, like the MDGs, on education, health, climate change, inequality and economic growth, all within the cooperation or partnership between and among developed, emerging and developing economies. Again, like the MDGs, the first goal of the SDGs centres on ending all forms of poverty anywhere in the world. This is followed sequentially by zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, et cetera. It has been eleven years since the SDGs started. Which of the objectives did we achieve? Are we going to have the same result as we had with the MDGs?

For any government to claim ignorance of or that it is not aware of the SDGs implies that such a government is a pretender and unserious, or that the leadership does not deserve to be there in the first place. Not making attempts to achieve the objectives is also indicative of a lack of respect for citizens’ welfare. The Nigerian government doesn’t actually tie itself to any development plan to avoid being pinned down to any project. The judgement is as you declare.

There are two development plans of relevance and indicative of the need for each country to have a development plan. The SDGs are a global development plan, and Agenda 2063 is the continental development plan. We have heard of Nigeria’s Agenda 2050, but not sure of its statutory existence as a development plan. The government has also not declared it so.

The problem with Nigeria is not a lack of revenue to carry out simple developmental projects, given how much is realised from tax revenues and levies, as well as internal debts. The problems have to do with the rising level of corruption and stealing, if they are different things, other forms of leakages, debt servicing, the absence of developmental projects as part of the priority programmes and general mismanagement.

There is a need for the government to declare publicly the projects already executed using external borrowing, with expected returns to offset the debts. The issues of transparency and accountability in public finance remain perennial problems with the Nigerian government. With that kind of attitude, economic development will remain on the drawing board for many decades to come. The government should not allow the SDGs to negatively determine its fate.