Post MDGs: Nigeria urged to articulate dev priority

Experts have urged the Nigerian government to articulate its development priorities ahead of September’s meeting in New York by world leaders on the new set of targets for the 2030.

The experts spoke in a seminar in Abuja where they emphasised the importance of developing nations setting quality goals and targets at the meeting.

The seminar organised by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre highlighted some of the challenges that Nigeria is facing in its priority areas such as education, energy, health, gender and agriculture.

In her presentation, an energy and climate economist Dr Isbel Galiana said removing fuel subsidy by Nigerian government would eliminate economic inefficiencies estimated to cost at least $10 billion (About N2 trillion) and including about $4 billion in subsidies on oil products smuggled out of the country and sold at a profit.

She said total removal of fuel subsidies would boost economic growth by 0.18 percent, but household incomes would decline. However, removal of half the subsidies and appropriate social transfers to protect the poor would increase rural income in the range 2.3-7.6 percent.

Spending one naira on social protection would pay back over two naira in the form of subsidy avoided plus increase household incomes. Subsidies avoided could be used to meet other targets.

She also urged government to consider as high priority improving access to electricity in the country.

In his presentation, a World Bank economist and educationist, Dr George Spacharopoulos, said quality of education is a big problem with Nigeria performing worst out of 22 sub-saharan and North African countries rated by the World Bank in 2008.

According to him the main contributing factors are poor physical facilities, inadequate sanitation, lack of textbooks and unqualified teachers.

To make matters worse, the high percentage of male teachers in the North means that many families there opt to withdraw girls from schools.

He suggested that the new government should not adopt vague targets which have been missed in the past and are unlikely to be met in the future but to focus on three vital areas where real progress can be made: improving school quality, getting more children into schools and increasing preschool coverage.