Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria

The Federal Government of Nigeria, under President Umaru Musa Ya’adua’s watch, finally admitted last week that Nigeria is not in a position to meet the Millennium Development Goals set for 2015! That did not come as a surprise because I have always admired President Yar’adua’s candour in whatever he does – or does not do!

There is this saying of the elders that if a tree falls across your road, the only way to pass along that road is to remove that tree. But if by the time you come to remove that tree, another tree has fallen on top of that tree, then you must remove the second tree in order to get to remove the first tree. Confused? Not to worry! At the time the Millennium Goals were set for all countries Nigeria’s numero uno problem was Poverty, Extreme Hunger and those problems that collectively make up the Millennium Development Goals. So we signed on to those goals. Just when we tried to figure out how to solve those problems another problem bigger than those problems fell on them pretty much like the proverbial second tree referred to above!

Unless you live in the moon, or just returned from a paid holiday there, you should know that Nigeria’s biggest problem today is corruption. Corruption is the second tree that has fallen on the first big tree and unless we fight corruption in this country, our score card in 2015 will not only fall short of the Millennium Development Goals but we would have retrogressed to a level where our indices in 2005 will be child’s play in comparison.

I don’t know about you, but I lived better in 2005 than today. If, in spite of all my efforts, I have fallen below the $1 dollar-a-day poverty line (would you believe it?) then I don’t know how many Nigerians live above that line? My level of poverty is not induced by laziness or lack of trying. It is caused by the fact that corruption in Nigeria has reached a level where some of those in custody of our resources now steal twenty out of every ten Naira they find leaving you to figure out how to deal with the deficit. If you cannot pay now, your children or grand children will pay.

So lets figure out a way to deal with corruption after which we can talk about Millennium Development Goals.

Tata, everybody

Napoleon