Nigeria And The Sustainable Development Goals: Setting The Course To 2030                                                                                                                                                        

In September year 2015, under a relatively quiet banner, the Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”) were announced as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Created to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (“MDGs”), the SDGs build upon the tenets of its predecessor in addressing the many cruel dimensions of poverty; combating inequality and injustice more holistically; and widening the breadth of the environmental targets to tackle climate change.

Despite the positive development of the SDGs, the relatively muted response to their announcement reinforces the fact that the MDGs largely missed their mark. The MDGs succeeded in creating public discourse and building a firm platform for organizing international development priorities around a set of unified objectives. However, they suffered greatly from the “soft bigotry of low expectations”; being conceived and executed exclusively by Western governments and organisations – who then sought to socially engineer huge changes in developing countries from the comfort of sky scrapers in New York. In retrospect, the MDGs were doomed to fail from the moment it was decided to exclude emerging markets from deciding on the goals and solutions for themselves.

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As I am an advocate of emerging market autonomy and indigenous-led development, I have been greatly encouraged by the SDGs, which are a significant improvement on the MDGs in a number of ways. Firstly, this long list of 17 goals (as opposed to the MDGs five), sub-goals, targets and suggestions were derived from a global consultation with leadership from developing countries. Secondly, and as a direct result of the first point, there is a radical change in the discourse around development to include a focus on global poverty, as opposed to just emerging market poverty, seeking to identify causes and solutions for poverty across all nations. Thirdly, the SDGs make it clear that the private sector will be one of the main engines in achieving these goals as sustained economic resilience requires private sector participation on a grand scale. The result of this is a global data resource/guide and a menu of targets that can be tailored by indigenous public and private sector organisations, in each market, to suit their reality.

For the UN and other leading Western development organisations to recognize at an institutional level that the indigenes of all countries are both best placed to and entirely capable of setting their own goals and targets, is a huge step forward. In fact, in this “SDG era”, Western institutions and groups are partnering with local institutions and individuals as a key strategy for achieving the goals.

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This change also puts the responsibility for developing their countries firmly back onto the shoulders of the citizens and governments of those countries. This is as important psychologically as it is politically and economically, particularly in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. This responsibility comes at a time when many of these countries, the most high profile example of which is Nigeria, are becoming real democracies. Young democracies filled with people empowered as much by the internet as by their own governments, determined to exercise their power and transform their countries over the next 15 years.

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Nigeria and the SDGs

The SDGs have come at an opportune time for Nigeria, President Buhari and his cabinet are clearly committed to long-term development and poverty alleviation through job creation. But they now have to create an entirely new road map, while trying to keep a well-funded opposition at bay. The SDGs maybe a big part of the solution, giving President Buhari’s administration a development framework which can be customized by them and on which they can structure their new plans.

In terms of SDG driven development, goal eight lends itself in particular to the Nigerian reality: “to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”. With over 170 million people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years of age, fulfilling this goal and taking advantage of the huge human capital resources in Nigeria will make this country a power-house of development.

The UN outlined its motivation for goal eight as being “due to the vital importance of labor markets for the production and generation of wealth, and equally for its distribution”. In Nigeria, unemployment figures range from 80% in the North to 30-40 % in the South. The informal sector is booming as ever, but this is still largely unrecorded. Regardless of what the true figures are, there is no doubt that bringing the majority of working people into the formal economy as tax payers and consumers, would change this country over night.

The Nigerian government has been focused on job creation for decades and certain laws, the most powerful of which is the 2010 Local Content Act, have already been passed giving the current government the tools they need to create jobs locally. Since 2010 Nigerian participation in the oil and gas sector has sky rocketed, and whilst there have been issues, one of the biggest successes of the law so far is in making local content the first consideration in every major project. However, with Nigeria spending $20 billion a year on its oil and gas sector; even if only 50% of this was fully domesticated, hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created.

The hope now is that the government maintains the will to enforce this law and extend similar local content requirements to other sectors of the economy. If they embrace the SDGs and goal eight in particular it is likely that they will. With proper policing such laws can result in value added local content on the indigenous and foreign side. Leading to lower costs and greater efficiency.

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Looking forward

The SDGs are a new chapter in global development and here in the beginning months, we must take diligent care to set a pace that will carry them successfully to 2030. To begin, our leaders in business, government and academia must ensure the goals remain in global consciousness and are worked tangibly into plans, projects and strategies from now until expiration.

Equally, to deliver concrete results in Nigeria, we must focus on building the reputation of our country as a place in which to do business, sustaining entrepreneurism, and increasing the depth of our markets. Such actions will complement President Buhari’s diligent work to improve security, stamp out corruption and bring more productivity to the economy so that Nigerians can work within the SDG framework to bring forth change faster and more efficiently.

     

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