The Executive Chairman, African Centre for Shared Development Capacity Building (ACSDCB), Ibadan, Professor Olu Ajakaiye has said that without solid partnership both at local, regional, national and international levels, many countries will not achieve the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs.
Professor Ajakaiye disclosed this during an interview with CEOAFRICA at the 10th Annual Ibadan Sustainable Development Summit (ISDS) 2019 organized by the Centre for Sustainable Development (CESDEV), University of Ibadan in collaboration with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) with the theme “Building and Sustaining Strategic Partnerships for the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals”.
Ajakaiye said “the ISDS conference was very focused, agenda setting and has brought to the forum the important issue of partnership because without partnership at the local, regional, national and international level, many countries will not deliver SDGs. If one country does not deliver SDGs, all countries would not have delivered it because the agenda is to leave no one behind. So, if one country does not make it, then we are failed and that is the essence of partnership. The points some of us are making is that partnership should begin at home. Don’t focus on looking for external partners when you are not even ready to receive the support and in order to receive the support from the external partners, your own indigenous or local partnership must be solid and strong.
Speaking about the failed MDGs in Africa, now SDGs, he said “There is something we call ‘Initial Conditions’. Initial conditions in Africa are quite challenging because the necessary conditions for us to be able to move forward are not there. One of the key desires of the SDGs is to have an economy that is diversified and sustainable, but you can see that in many African countries, that is not yet there. Most of our productions are still based on primary products. We produced primary products, exports and import refined products. Imagine a country like Nigeria that is so well endowed with crude oil, instead of us to see it as an opportunity to diversify the economy, we only see it as an opportunity to just export, make money which is very unfortunate”.
“It is embarrassing that Nigeria is the only OPEC member country that is exporting crude oil and importing refined products and it goes on to agriculture, mining, solid minerals and to all other aspects of life. My hope is that, with the effort of the government, hopefully to start proper planning and emphasize investment on necessary condition for take-off which is ensuring that we upgrade and modernise our infrastructure, ensures that we establish structures that will begin to convert our crude materials into higher value added commodities, create jobs for the teeming population. If we do all these we will find out that we are setting up initial conditions because it is the enabled youthful population that would then be the leader of tomorrow that would generate the innovation, advancement, technology that we will need to move to the next level” Professor Ajakaiye added.
He further stated that “most of our agendas (development plans) that are actually aimed at achieving the SDGs and more are excessively personalized so that when a leader leaves, and the next person comes, he doesn’t want to continue with what the other is doing but if we have the kind of partnership that we are proposing which we will have government, private sector, civil society and NGOs, if they are all there, what would be changing is the political leader politically. In this partnership, when a new leader comes at the political level, he will meet the anchor which are the private sectors, civil society that will tell him what they have agreed upon, the consensus and if he have his own idea, he will add to what he met on ground instead of throwing away others opinion and like starting a new policy. In essence, an arrangement where you have personalised development agenda breeds discontinuity even discourages the private sectors to buy into your programmes.
Professor Ajakaiye however said that we need solid partnership with leadership, cooperative private sector, supportive Civil Society Organizations, Labour Unions, Non-Governmental Organizations to ensure that we establish our agenda to achieve the sustainable development goals in Nigeria and Africa.
The conference was attended by many resource persons, participants, academicians, researchers, policy makers, Civil Organisations across the world to proffered solutions to the sustainable development goals in Nigeria and Africa.
