Why Nigeria has Performed Poorly for 5 Years in SDGs, Expert

By Mary Nnah

Co-Founder/ CEO of Development Nigeria, Mr. Michael Ale, a development expert, has lamented Nigeria’s deplorable performance on the scale of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Speaking to stakeholders on development at a forum organised by his development platform, Development Nigeria recently in Lagos, Ale identified lack of finance and failure by government to properly domesticate the SGDs development model to meet our peculiar development status, as factors inhibiting Nigeria from realising the goals after five years.

The SDGs is a 15-year development strategy designed by the United Nations (UN) as an improvement on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for member nations to effect development in all areas, particularly the grassroots.

SDGs target development and growth in fighting poverty through empowerment, job creation, provision of clean and safe water, roads, power, as well as provision of other social amenities for meaningful development and growth. But Nigeria has not fared well in the foregoing areas.

The Aiyegbaju-Ekiti born Ale who is also the National President of the Association of Water Well Drilling Rig Owners Practitioners (AWDROP), said Nigeria’s late entry into the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), model, had adversely affected the country’s socioeconomic development pace adding that there is an urgent need for government at all levels to domesticate the principles of SDGs in the Nigeria context for the nation to achieve meaningful development.

“The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were designed to primarily eradicate poverty. We had domesticated the MDGs in Nigeria and it worked but we couldn’t meet up with the global indices of MDGs because we joined late and we had our own peculiar challenges. SDGs came up with seventeen goals, it is an herculean task and we could not meet up because we have so much to meet up with. A lot is being done in Nigeria, but we aren’t doing much in monitoring. If we are slowing down in developing, what can we sustain?

“If we want to grow the sustainable development must be domesticated in the Nigerian context. What is peculiar to Ghana may be very alien to Nigeria. What suits U.K that is already developed may not suit Nigeria that is a developing nation”, he said.

“The SDGs must be made to grow in the Nigerian context. Every nation is to pick the goals as a guiding principle on how to domesticate the implementation of that suggestion by the UN and bring it to our own status of development and probably keep on developing and maintaining the level of development we have attained. Those seventeen goals must be made to match the status of our development in Nigeria”, Ale noted further.

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