The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted in 2000 and are supposed to have been attained by 2015, that is, in two years’ time. There are currently a number of on-going consultative processes in the search of a successor agreement. The UN Secretary General has appointed a 27 member High Level Panel with three co-chairs – President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia. Our own Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a member and Amina Mohammed, former Senior Special Assistant to the President on MDGs is the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General on the process.
For us in Nigeria, it is important that we have a genuine debate over the coming months that goes beyond a list of goals and targets not bound together by a coherent narrative which is consistent with the challenges facing our development process. Nigeria still lags behind and it is now clear that we are unlikely to be able to meet any of the goals by 2015. The three levels of government, federal, state and local, are simply not investing enough to meet the goals and a significant part what is being invested is lost due to massive public corruption and diversion of resources to meet security challenges. As we move forward, I propose six key challenges we need to address to improve the lives and livelihoods of Nigerians.
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