As the countdown to 2015 begins, reports reveal that the country is unlikely to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) deadline for poverty eradication, as five out of every 10 Nigerians is adjudged to still live in poverty. Alexander Chiejina examines Nigeria's chances in this regard.
At the start of this millennium, world leaders were concerned about the poverty burden, particularly in developing nations across the globe. This concern was born out of poverty and the dearth of productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods in that category of nations. In a bid to address these challenges, the United Nations established the MDGs to help underdeveloped countries overcome the problems of illiteracy, poverty, poor health and quality of life.
Much emphasis was placed on the attainment of MDG targets in education because of its pivotal role in national development. The targets include education for all through 100 percent gross enrolment rate by 2015, gender equality in access to education opportunities, eradication of adult illiteracy, and improvement of the quality of education.
Other goals are: promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development. However, five years before 2015 rolls by, and in view of the next month's United Nations General Assembly meeting, during which countries will be assessed on their MDG achievements, calls have made on the Office of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the country to strengthen critical areas of development projects so as to actualise set targets.
While receiving the report of the Presidential Committee on the Assessment and Monitoring of the MDGs recently, Ima Niboro, senior special assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, advised that the committee should ensure that funds budgeted for various projects were adequately used to meet the yearnings and aspirations of Nigerians, especially in the health and education sectors.
"President Goodluck Jonathan identified the need for the committee to do more in the health sector to further reduce the maternal mortality rate. Also, the harmonisation and generation of a baseline data that will assist in proper monitoring and evaluation of all MDG-related projects is essential," remarked Niboro.
For Femi Akinwumi, public affairs analyst and medical expert at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, while MDGs 4, 5 and 6 seek to reduce child mortality rate, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, the non-effective Primary Health Care (PHC) system in the country which should cater for about 70 percent of the population's health needs has instead put good healthcare delivery in jeopardy.
According to him, "Very few Local governments (LGs) in the country have more than five medical doctors on their payroll managing the PHCs for the provision of basic but effective healthcare to the people in their domains. These LGs share up to 30 percent of monthly allocation from the federation account running into scores of millions of naira into the coffer of each LG. In view of this, we as a nation cannot realise the targets of MDGs without an adequately structured, properly managed and well-equipped PHC system."
In the meantime, evidence from the 2006 MDG report shows there is the likelihood of achieving three of the eight goals in Nigeria: achieving universal basic education, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing global partnership for development; while the health MDGs remain daunting challenges for Nigeria. However, a critical barrier to achieving the MDGS remains the unavailability of up-to-date data on most of the indicators. This is compounded by the limited funding available for data generation and management, as expressed by the report.
It would be recalled that while making a presentation at a three-day public hearing to assess the implementation of MDGs in Nigeria between 2007 and 2010, organised by the House of Representatives Committee on MDGs, Hajiya Amina Az-Zubair, senior special assistant to the president on MDGs, disclosed that the MDG project had gulped N1.04trillion since 2006.
Amina Az-Zubair explained that since 2006, $1 billion (about N150 billion) had been gathered from the Paris Club debt relief, out of which the Federal Government takes $750million (N112.50billion) and state governments $250million (about N375 billion). The SSA therefore emphasised the need to be on guard so that funds appropriated for the attainment of the MDGs, about $1 billion per annum were not misappropriated. "N20 billion was appropriated for her office in 2007, out of which N18.4 billion was allocated to the states under the Conditional Grant Scheme [CGS], and thatN300 million was returned to the treasury as unspent fund. In 2008, her office got N59.3 billion and gave N2.3 billion to states as CGS; while N15.5 billion was returned. In 2009, the office received N32.6 billion, spent N27.04 billion given to states under the CGS, while in 2010, it was appropriated N35.02 billion but was yet to make the CGS disbursements," she said, adding that 90 percent of Nigerian children under school age had been registered and attend school, which was a significant achievement as it translated to nine out of 10 children.
"11.6 million Nigerian school children benefit from better quality education from over 200,000 teachers retained through MDGs. Through the work we are doing, many remote communities across the country, some of which have never experienced any form of real development, now have access to primary healthcare centres, boreholes, classrooms and so on," she concluded.
Meanwhile, reports during a workshop on the validation of the 2010 MDGs report and five-year countdown strategy for Nigeria held in Abuja at the weekend state that MDGs implementation in the country over the past few years is a mixed-bag of modest and steady progress on many goals and slow progress on a few others.
The report further notes that out of the eight goals, Nigeria has recorded an average performance on five MDGs, with less satisfactory performance on three others. Listed under the less satisfactory performance are goals one, five and seven.
Goal 1 which is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015; the report noted "although poverty has reduced since 2000, the reality is that among every ten Nigerians, five still live in poverty. Growth has not been sufficiently equitable or generated employment," adding however that nutrition has improved significantly. On goal five, improved maternal health, the report noted that there is sizeable reduction of maternal mortality ratio from 800/100,000 (2003) to 157/100,000 (2008). Proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel increased slightly from 36 percent (2003) to 39 percent (2008). The report also noted increase in contraceptive prevalence rate from 8.0 percent (2003) to 10.0 percent (2008).
One salient point is the fact that the timeline for the achievement of the MDGs is 2015, not 2020; hence the goals of the MDGs are a lot more modest and geared towards salvaging the less privileged. However, constitutional responsibility for implementation on almost all the goals rests with the states and local governments in Nigeria's federal structure. But despite remarkable strides at the federal level, appreciation of the requirements for meeting these goals, as well as institutional capacity remain relatively low at the other levels of government.
For Otive Igbuzor, new representative, Centre for Development and Population Activities country office in Nigeria, "there is the need to formulate and implement policies that will promote transparency and accountability, overcome institutional constraints, promote pro-poor growth, bring about structural change, enhance distributive equity, engender social and cultural re-orientation, engineer political transformation, promote human development, practise inclusive urban development, generate employment and transform power relations," Igbuzor concluded.
By Alexander Chiejina
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