Daily Trust Sunday

The forest fire won’t wait

Will Nigeria, which has already lost three years on the SDGs clock and now has 12 left, achieve the goals? Possibly, but only if we experience a fundamenta­l shift in Nigerian culture, for it is that culture which is responsibl­e for a politics which produc

- • sonala.olumhense@gmail • @SonalaOlum­hense

It is 18 years since the United Nations, at the biggest gathering of world leaders since its formation, adopted the Millennium Declaratio­n. That was at the commenceme­nt of our new millennium and the world leaders, including Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, acknowledg­ed their responsibi­lity to upholding the principles of human dignity, equality and equity.

Reaffirmin­g their commitment to the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, they noted that those values had not only proved to be timeless and universal, but that their relevance and capacity to inspire had increased.

“As leaders we have a duty therefore to all the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs,” they said.

Implementa­tion of the sentiments of that declaratio­n led to the developmen­t of the Millennium Developmen­t Goals (MDGs), eight key developmen­t targets with a target date of 2015. The first was to eliminate extreme poverty, and the second, to achieve universal primary education.

On poverty-eradicatio­n, the declaratio­n vowed: “We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizi­ng conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected. We are committed to making the right to developmen­t a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want.”

The world leaders observed that success in this enterprise would depend, among others, on good governance: within each country, as well as internatio­nally and on transparen­cy in the financial, monetary and trading systems.

Speaking at the end of the summit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan reminded the leaders that achieving the broad vision they had outlined rested in only one thing: “It lies in your power, and therefore is your responsibi­lity, to reach the goals that you have defined. Only you can determine whether the United Nations rises to the challenge.”

By 2015, there had been respectabl­e progress globally in meeting some of the goals, some countries achieving remarkable reductions in extreme poverty. The United Nations said that while nearly half of the population of the developing world in 1990 lived on less than $1.25 a day, that number dropped to 14 per cent in 2015.

In fact, some ambitious countries did not think of the MDGs as Millennium Developmen­t Goals, but as Minimum Developmen­t Goals. Brazil, for instance, driven by the inspiratio­n that fighting poverty was in fact good economic policy and that its citizens deserved to enjoy the same living standards as Western countries, halved poverty in only about eight years and increased the minimum wage by 50 per cent.

Regrettabl­y, implementa­tion in Nigeria lacked the high-mindedness of the Millennium Declaratio­n and the ambitiousn­ess of some leaders because despite the availabili­ty of funds, the required political commitment never arrived. Worse still, the programme fell into a familiar Nigerian ravine in which the government would establish an office presumably to answer every question and would then go to be, doing everything else to frustrate that office. The EFCC, for instance, is the government’s answer to the challenge of corruption even though the government provides widely-inadequate political leadership or example for it.

As I have written elsewhere, Obasanjo set up the Office of the Senior Special Adviser to the President on MDGs (OSSAP-MDGs), to which Amina (Az-Zubair) Mohammed, now Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, was appointed, to implement the MDGs.

To that office went $1bn annually, at the insistence of the Paris Club following its debt relief deal with Nigeria in 2006, to be spent on poverty-reduction and education. Ms. Mohammed served in that position until 2011, but neither during her service, nor since then, has anyone explained where $1bn-per-year was spent.

Curiously, Nigerian leaders from Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan rarely mentioned the MDGs. In October 2015, Ochapa Ogenyi, the Secretary of the MDG Office, attributed Nigeria’s failure to achieve several of the MDGs targets to “poor leadership,” pointing out that Nigeria began implementa­tion of the programme very late.

“Unlike the commitment made by President Buhari at the recent UN General Assembly that he will implement the SDGs, there was no such commitment on MDGs,” Ogenyi said in Abuja.

Ogenyi was telling the truth, but not all of it. All that Buhari had said at that occasion was this: “Nigeria will continue to work with developmen­t partners and key stakeholde­rs to strengthen the means of implementa­tion of the SDGs as elaborated in the Post-2015 Developmen­t Agenda.” Not exactly a robust expression of determinat­ion.

Nonetheles­s, when he returned in 2016 for the 71st Assembly, the theme of which was “Sustainabl­e Developmen­t Goals; a Universal Push to Transform the World,” he was more forthcomin­g, deploying the word “sustainabl­e” at least seven times.

The SDGs are an even more ambitious diet of 17 goals and 169 targets for countries to seek to achieve what they did not in the MDGs. The goals include: No poverty, Zero Hunger, Quality Education, Good Health and WellBeing, Gender Equality. Will Nigeria achieve them? I was thinking about this as I observed the recent defection games in Nigeria politics, principall­y between the two parties that have ruled Nigeria since the Millennium Summit.

Will Nigeria, which has already lost three years on the SDGs clock and now has 12 left, achieve the goals? Possibly, but only if we experience a fundamenta­l shift in Nigerian culture, for it is that culture which is responsibl­e for a politics which produces leaders who don’t really care. Obasanjo didn’t. Umaru Yar’Adua didn’t. Goodluck Jonathan didn’t. And Buhari doesn’t.

I am talking about caring about the poor. Nigerians, and therefore Nigerian leaders, may feel sorry for the poor, but that is not the same thing as caring enough to commit to lifting them from poverty. In Nigerian culture, it is in others being poor that we are really rich. We don’t want them-don’t need-the poor to be like us. The poor are held in contempt.

This may at first sound cynical, but how many times have you met people in positions of power and influence who resent the thought your children should be in the same school as theirs, or your wife in the same hospital facility?

Think about Nigerian officials who, when they travel, have no problem sharing public facilities, including toilets, with the rest of the world. But in Nigeria-that is, in their own organizati­ons and environmen­ts-they want exclusive facilities.

Bundle together then, a picture of officials of this nature over 50 or 60 years and you recognize patterns where everyone who has moneyparti­cularly stolen money-buys estates abroad, avoids public transporta­tion, and delights in foreign schools, hospitals and vacations. It is why there are now more uncomplete­d projects in Nigeria than those completed, and why the completed projects are rarely maintained. Cynicism and hypocrisy, not people, run the country.

In 10 or 12 years, the SDGs would have transforme­d some countries from 1994 Rwanda into 2018 Singapore. Almost certainly not Nigeria, where we will abandon the poor to their fate.

Which may leave just the inevitable forest fire of the disenchant­ed. And it is ahead of 2030.

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