Nigeria's efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals

An opening of a health care center in Nigeria gave officials a chance to speak on how the country is striving to meet the Millennium Development Goals. The Nigerian newspaper This Day Online was at the occasion.

In Nigeria, a comprehensive strategy was adopted to achieve the set targets, with the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President coordinating the strategy. Virtually all the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in the country have adopted the MDGs document with a view to help in realising its objectives. Of the leading states in the implementation of the objectives is Zamfara, where so far, a total of 59 projects have been executed whose impacts are being felt by the people in all parts of the state. The projects include construction of 27 new primary healthcare centres (PHC) and renovation of nine existing ones, purchase of hospital equipment and construction of 22 solar electrification plants in strategic locations across the state.

Speaking at the commissioning of a primary health care centre in Zurmi local government area of the state recently, the Zamfara State MDGs Coordinator Alhaji Sanusi Hashim said as at December 2007, the state government had received just over N1.2b under the conditional grant scheme of the programme in Nigeria. He said 10 per cent of this amount was contributed by the seven participating local government councils, thereby bringing the total funds for the project in the state to over N1.3b.

“With these funds at our disposal, we were able to execute projects that have touched the lives of the benefiting communities in many ways. The projects were executed at a total cost of N1, 335, 520,000.00 within the specified implementation period of five months,” he said.

Speaking in the same vein, Governor Mahmud Aliyu Shinkafi described the MDGs as a representing a collective aspiration of the entire global community to address the vicious challenges facing development efforts most especially in the developing world. He said the widening gap between the industrialised economies and the Least Developed Countries, most of which are in the sub-Saharan Africa is alarming.
According to him, the goals are not only timely, but a necessary framework to rescue one of the largest proportions of humanity from the abyss of poverty and other problems associated with economic backwardness. He added that Zamfara State, like other communities across the world, strongly believe that the Millennium Development Goals must be pursued with vigour and determination.

“Our administration has rearticulated all the existing policies and development agenda being pursued prior to the Millennium Summit in order for them to conform to these universal objectives within the defined time frame. It is our conviction that these objectives are attainable between now and 2015, if we sustain efforts at combating corruption and public service reforms which would reposition the service to become more productive, visionary and proactive. It is this conviction that informs our decision to strengthen our anti-corruption stand, direct all ministries, directorates and agencies to comply strictly with budgetary provisions as well as due process in all their dealings.”