06 Sep 2009 |
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YAR’ADUA WANTS N24 TRILLION PER YEAR! Later this month, the G-20 will be meeting in Pittsburgh, in the United States, but Nigeria will be there only if they sell observer tickets. Also this month, the 64th United Nations General Assembly will open in New York, but Nigeria will be there only to fill her seat. They have seats there for everybody, even those that enjoy no credibility, and make no impact. New York would take anybody’s millions. It is somewhat curious that with the approach of the General Assembly, however, Nigeria last week announced that it will need N4 trillion annually between now and 2015 to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), following alleged expenditures of N321 billion on them from 2006 to 2008. The announcement comes five months after the President stunned the world by saying Nigeria will not achieve set MDGs targets in poverty-reduction, education, maternal health and child health. These are interesting matters and numbers the mass media ought to be asking our government about. I know Nigeria has a Presidential Committee on the MDGs, but exactly what does it do? To me, it is funny to hear Amina Ibrahim, who is said to be the Presidential assistant on the MDGs, cry out for N24 trillion per year in the same breath in which she says that, of the N321 billion in question, only 68 per cent of it was actually spent. The rest, she told journalists whose guns always seem to be unloaded, “was returned.” I ask: If Yar’Adua’s government cannot invest an average of N321 over two years, how will it know what to do with N24 trillion in one year? Does it have an MDG strategy? If so, where and what is it? And why is it that the President was so ignorant of it he basically conceded our collapse on the MDG file last April?
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