By ABUBAKAR YUSUF

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a driving force that had resisted all negative tendencies, though domesticated to bridge the gap of underdevelopment, unemployment rates, poverty level, and provide other social interventions, including all other basic necessities of life.

The global body established some decades ago meant to bridge the gap between the extremely poor and the rich was also meant to make life more meaningful to ordinary Nigerians in the area of provision of critical social infrastructures like water, light, rural roads, provision of health facilities, basic education, empowerment, capacity building, skill development, among many others.

As a robust intervention agency, a lot of positive impact towards social equilibrium has successfully been put in place all-round Nigeria, not minding the natural and man-made phenomenon, that covers health, education, economy and all other invisible developmental strides.

This alone had contributed greatly to the jerking up of the countryside Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from a low ebb of 0.33 per cent to an appreciable level, with effects on the continuous development of all facets of our national life.

The positive development overtime cannot be divorced from a well-thought out leadership with proactive tendencies manning the agency, geared towards the continuous development of Nigeria, irrespective of the prevailing situations.

With natural occurrences in recent times, from the global economic recession and COVID-19 pandemic with multiplier effect on the generality of Nigerians, the redoubled stance of the intervention agency had impacted greatly to improve the dire consequences of the grievous economic quagmire, occasioned by these two critical situations.

Though with minimal effects, the current 33 per cent unemployment rate is being mitigated by the SDGs, through the creation of small-scale businesses, capacity-building and trainings, as well as macro- and micro- economic programmes, wealth creation with its various outlets, initiatives and interventions directly or indirectly by ensuring the strict execution of projects, according to job specifications of constituency projects of the federal lawmakers, domiciled in SDGs and its interventions projects.

The numerous social interventions in the areas of health, education, provision of water both in boreholes and in other areas large water treatment centres to reduce the negative consequences arising from health status, school enrollment and provision of potable drinkable water to address the incessant sicknesses through water-borne diseases.

The determination and efforts towards the domestication of SDGs programmes in all facets of the country had greatly changed the tiding of the envisaged 10 million poverty lines, as predicted by experts in Nigeria in the coming years.

This is in addition to dousing the growing effects of the many-months lockdown of the world economies, arising from the dreadful coronavirus that had resisted the first, second and, now, in the third wave through awareness and its interventions.

Aside all these, the improvement in the literacy level to combat illiteracy through provision of computers and other accessories in the health, education, capacity and skill development programmes in the country, had assisted in no small measure to ameliorate the high negative effects of the twin occurrences.

With concerted efforts and actions in the new decades of development tagged 2020-2030, it is obvious that SDGs will redoubled its efforts in the areas of more determination to address the growing dearth of social security, economic growth and other critical interventions.

This could be achieved to douse the rising unemployment rates and poverty levels in Nigeria, using SDGs as a springboard to economic and social prosperity.

•Abubakar Yusuf, Public Affairs Analyst, writes from Abuja.

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