Nigerian official slams MDGs
Dr Umar Bindir, Director-General, National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion, on Wednesday described the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as another unattainable and worse policy programme to be undertaken in developing countries and especially Africa.
He said the programme would be another failure story in Africa, due to the fact that, it lacked direction and has no baselines for measuring poverty levels a prerequisite for actualizing the implementation processes.
Dr Bindir made this disposition when he addressed participants of the Second Regional Science Journalism Cooperation (SjCOOP) under the auspices of the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ) in Abuja, the Federal Capital of Nigeria.
About 25 journalists from Anglophone Africa precisely, from 13 countries, are attending the weeklong workshop aimed to sharpen their skills and position them for challenges in science reporting.
He said the phenomenon could best be described as “placing a goal post on another planet and expecting that people scored goals there.”
Dr Bindir said development partners were corrupting the system by throwing out unrealistic policies, whose targets they knew could not be achieved.
He, therefore, challenged African heads of States, academia, research and science institutions to look inward for home-bred solutions for the continent’s myriads of problems.
Dr Bindir called for setting up of African “home-goals” with practical and achievable targets, strengthening its educational infrastructure, science, research, manufacturing, development of human capital and land reforms for a guaranteed security and economic stability.
“Vibrant science, national systems of innovations, research and development, technical acquisition, intellectual property rights, information and technology communication are needed to be harnessed including the continent’s raw materials,” he said.
Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General at the world leaders meeting in New York, last week said targets of MDG’s could still be met if enough work was done.
He urged world leaders to stick to the task despite the global downturn, insisting they could be achieved by 2015.
Ban Ki-Moon entreated the leaders to redeem their pledges towards making the MDGs attainable by the deadline.
Professor Jeffery Sachs, a Development Economist and one of the main architects of the goals castigated rich countries for failing to honour their pledges for the achievement of the goals.
He said they have “consistently failed to live up to expectation on aid and dismissed suggestions that economic recession was affecting the government’s capability to live up to their promises.”
“High income countries have spent trillions of dollars on war and unfortunately they just have not invested in peace yet,” Prof Sachs noted.
Meanwhile, a report launched by the African Union Commission (AUC), African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the UNDP has indicated Africa made steady progress on MDGs.
MDGs are eight internationally agreed targets, which aim to reduce poverty, hunger, maternal and child deaths, disease, inadequate shelter, gender inequality and environmental degradation by 2015.
According to the report, Africa has made tremendous strides in achieving universal education with 76 percent net enrolment in primary education in 2008, up from 58 percent in 1999.
It indicated there are close to 91 percent girls per 100 boys in schools in 2008, up from 85 in 1999.
Under-five mortality rates have dropped from 184/1000 in 1990 to 144/1000 in 2008.
The report said Africa was on track to meeting the water targets with 60 percent of people with access to drinking water in 2008 compared with 49 percent in 1990.
It said adoption of new and expanded social protection programmes, better policy coordination and the incorporation of the MDGs and performance indicators at the heart of African countries development strategies facilitated these progresses.
The report said despite these, a number of challenges persisted in maternal health, with proportions of deliveries attended by skilled personnel only marginally increasing from 1990 to 2008.
It mentioned lack of access to sanitation facilities, vulnerability to external factors, food price volatility and the economic downturn as impediment to actualizing progress.
Source: GNA