Powering the Sustainable Development Goals for Green Growth in Nigeria

Introduction

The Nigerian economy is one that constantly flounders on the growth path, bedevilled with ever expanding and unsustainable population growth. Several of the United Nations plans and goals designed for growth and meaningful development of countries have failed to record any success for some countries among which is Nigeria. The eight Millennium Development Goals of2015 and seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of 2030 of which very few countries of the emerging and frontier status have achieved any meaningful success in line with the expectation of the United Nations. While the MDGs were to move the countries to a stage of stability for human existence and further development, the SDGs were real human concerns that signposts economic and sustainable environmental and development issues for the entire ecosystem. With the introduction of the SDGs the policy became what countries that missed out of the MDGs could adopt to match up with the others who are strictly following the SDGs. The SDGs can be surmised into three basic areas: the need for participation of all groups on decision making, eradication of inequality and poverty and promotion of environmental protection and ecosystem sustainability. The MDG has come and gone; either partly or fully met, its general assessment was based on two key issues: maternal health and poverty reduction. In each case its measurement data collection from resource poor countries with ineffective polices have been a major setback of the measurement of whatever was achieved (Ahmed, 2014). Measuring the MDGs as it concerns developing countries was circumspectly done in order not to assume over performance especially given that these are areas where there has been underperformance in those goals (Fukuda-Parr, Greenstein, & Stewart How, 2013). Nigeria is one of such developing countries where till date the MDGs remain inconclusive. With the SDGs the countries could make use of the length of time as these goals would be in pursuit up to 2013.

Of the SDGs seventeen goals six directly or indirectly address the issue of green trading and economy. Particularly, SDGs, 6, 7, 11, 12, and 15 deal with the issues of clean sustainable energy in the ecosystem and strong institutions to support human development. While many of the MDGs were baselines for human existence the possibility of jumpstarting to the SDGs with many of the MDGs unfulfilled presents a monumental problem that countries intending to latch to the SGDs must surmount and conquer. Many of the studies conducted on the success of the MDGs blame the social malaise of corruption and insufficient resources on the failure of the Nigerian government to achieve meaningful success (Chandiramani, 2014, Kolawole, Adeigbe, Zaggi, & Owonibi, 2014). The failure many countries experienced is based more on the lack of capacity, inability to be courageous enough to implement and the state fractionalisation and lack of national cohesion such that actual performance was dwarfed in those countries. Asadullah and Savoia (2018) detail that the nationhood experiences on management of the MGDs were very much pivotal to the success recorded by them. This still boils down to country capacity in the management of national affairs. Finally, an official scorecard from the Presidency did not rate the MDGs a success from the Government point of view. Musa (2015) mentioned that only MGD5 was achieved with ease and summarizes the basic issues of concern as culture, attitudinal factors, lack of financial capacity, economic challenges as well insufficient and inadequate supervisory capacity coupled with insufficient data. In spite of all these failures, there comes the superior and more capacity-demanding Sustainable Development Goals for complete achievement by 2030.The larger SDGs showed the understanding of the problems with performance of various capacity-challenged countries and their participation and successful achievement of the current SDGs.