One month from now, New York will welcome Mr. Goodluck Jonathan as leader of Nigeria to the United Nations General Assembly.
One month from now, New York will welcome Mr. Goodluck Jonathan as leader of Nigeria to the United Nations General Assembly.
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Between the City of New York and the State Department, chances are that Nigeria is being “encouraged” not to miss the party. By now, the world knows Mr. Jonathan as a man who travels in large crowds. Even with only a few of the 10-12 planes in the presidential jet pool heading towards New York, in addition to other “officials” jetting in from Abuja on commercial flights, Nigeria would do the local economy a world of good.
But theoretically, it is good to the people of Nigeria that Jonathan would be coming to America for. As part of the 65th General Assembly, the United Nations has invited world leaders to a High Level Summit on to discuss how to accelerate achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
This is a conundrum because as far as the MDGs are concerned, Nigeria has demonstrated only political interest, not political will. And political will is the most important resource required to achieve them.
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From Olusegun Obasanjo, who was in office when the MDG targets were set, to Mr. Jonathan—who may feel he owes the Nigerian people nothing since he never begged us to vote for him—we have had no leader in the past 10 years who saw the MDGs as an opportunity rather than a burden.
As a result, we have squandered 10 of the 15 years that, along with 190 other countries, we promised to pursue these development targets aggressively.
Our promise was to: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal education; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV & AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.
While some nations accepted these as an article of faith and as an opportunity, Nigeria has emerged as one of the more profoundly pathetic failure cases. We do not have an MDGs strategy, or presence, or energy. We do not have a determination to achieve the MDGs, which seem to have achieved a nuisance quality in government-speak.
I know why: in our leaderships, the concept of terminating poverty, for instance, is the direct antithesis of the determination to buy private jets or grab oil blocks or nail down big contracts. Politicians want government office to separate them from the common people, not make them the same.
And eradicating poverty suggests communism, or at least a society in which those people are like us. If you observe the way powerful Nigerians treat their domestic assistants, particularly when they are juxtaposed with their own children, you know they resent the thought “eradicating” poverty or “universalizing” education. That partly is why Nigerian leaders do not maintain our hospitals; they and their wives would rather die naked in foreign hospitals.
In Nigeria, it is the daily images of poverty around our rich and powerful that make them feel like men. In Obasanjo’s time, remember, he got angry when he was shown basic United Nations statistics declaring that over 70% of Nigerians live on less than one dollar per day. His response was not to try to conquer poverty, but to re-define it: he asked government officials to give him better numbers to play with.
“Yes sir!” answered Professor Ode Ojowu, who was the fawning Chief Economic Adviser to the President. Obasanjo explained that he did not know any (Nigerian) who did not know what he would eat the following day.
Yar’Adua may have been too sick to understand what the MDGs were. He told a newspaper early in 2009 our country could not achieve four of them by 2015 (six years away!)
Jonathan has retained the same token acknowledgement of the subject in the form of Ms. Amina Ibrahim, the Special Assistant on the MDGs who has been handed down since Obasanjo. She is probably very good, but whatever it is she is being asked to do is not seriously designed to help Nigeria achieve the MDGs.
Still, we can move mountains.
In Mr. Ban’s report, “Keeping the promise: a forward-looking review to promote an agreed action agenda to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015,” which was prepared for next month’s summit, Mr. Jonathan will find the following eloquent assessment: “Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals remains feasible with adequate commitment, policies, resources and effort. The Millennium Declaration represents the most important collective promise ever made to the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Mr. Ban also writes, “Our world possesses the knowledge and the resources to achieve the MDGs and embrace a sustainable development process for a brighter, more secure and more prosperous future for all.”
The problem, as I have said, is that Nigeria’s leadership does not believe any of this. That is why it would be interesting to learn of Mr. Jonathan’s contributions should he choose to participate at next month’s roundtables. The themes will be: Addressing the challenge of poverty, hunger and gender equality; Meeting the goals of health and education; Promoting sustainable development; Addressing emerging issues and evolving approaches; Addressing the special needs of the most vulnerable; and Widening and strengthening partnerships.
What will Mr. Jonathan say? He cannot make the same empty old argument that Nigeria lacks the “resources” because around him on his delegation will be some of Nigeria’s most excellent minds. He cannot, because within a few hours’ drive from the United Nations, there are no fewer than 10,000 top doctors, scientists, economic planners, agriculturists, or teachers.
And no, he cannot tell the world Nigeria lacks the resources because he will be speaking in front of people each of whom will have in his file a copy of Jonathan’s embarrassing “50th independence anniversary” budget.
Each of those world leaders will have a record of the three jets he has just bought, and the brazen looting that his government superintends (not that they will all object, since their own economies are often the beneficiaries). They will know that every member of Jonathan’s vast delegation to New York will be draining the Nigerian economy at the rate of about $1,000 per day in hotels and allowances.
My point is that even with only five years to go, Nigeria can achieve the MDGs if Jonathan and his people are determined to do so. I can make this assertion because some of the countries that will be reporting their remarkable leaps and bounds in a few weeks achieved them within a burst of just a few years. I also know that there are a lot of tools to help us, including the June 2008 recommendations of the MDG Steering Group called “Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Africa.”
But Nigeria cannot take advantage of the opportunities in front of her unless Nigeria’s leaders change. Last Thursday, for instance, at a workshop on the MDGs in Abuja, the government declared Nigeria as having recorded an “average performance” on five of the MDGs with “less satisfactory performance” on three others. That is government mumbo-jumbo for “nothing to report,” better known as failure. There is nothing to report because we have put in next to nothing.
There was much worse, last week. Ms. Ibrahim spoke about Nigeria trying to set up a “Count Down Strategy “to outline the roadmap to accelerating progress towards Nigeria’s achievement of the MDGs by 2015.”
Part of the “strategy,” she said, would “chart the trajectory of MDGs financing and investment to 2015 and interface with Vision 20:2020 and the Seven-Point Agenda.”
Apparently, nobody has told her the Seven-Point hoax has been buried. And Ms. Ibrahim, curiously, did not repeat what she said last September: that Nigeria would need N4trillion per year to achieve the MDGs. She also did not seem to know that in a few years, the Vision 20:2020 thing will morph into the alliterative Peoples Democratic Party joke that the MDGs were a few years ago.
There is a lot of revisionism and deceit going on within the corridors of power and privilege in Nigeria. What we must do is begin by understanding that it is all in our hands. And everyone is now wise to our shallow speeches and the petty deceptions we can no longer hide.
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