User:Fm122/mdgs

Nigeria, with the highest average per capita GDP ($1,467 PPP, 1980-2008) in the following group of nine sub-Saharan African nations, is likely in 2015 to have made the poorest performance on achieving the first five United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG), with an average achievement of 24.5%, while Ethiopia, with the second-lowest per capita income ($560) in the sample is forecast to have the highest MDG achievement rate (95%):

Why the enormous Ethiopia-Nigeria discrepancy when they have nearly equivalent Human Development Index rankings (Nigeria: 0.511 & rank 158th, Ethiopia: 0.411 & rank 171st in 2007)? One possible explanation is the extent of ethnic diversity: according to the Ethnologue database of world languages, there are 521 languages currently spoken in Nigeria (about 3.3 languages per one million inhabitants) compared to Ethiopia's 88 (1.0 language per million Ethiopians); Nigeria is hence three times more culturally diverse than Ethiopia, and thus more challenging to govern (Ethnologue Languages of the World, Statistical Summaries, http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=country).

Another interpretation is the "resource curse" of oil. Nigeria is the only nation in the above nine-nation set in which, on a per capita basis averaged over the period 1980-2008 in US dollars, the "illicit" outflows of capital ("capital flight", $58) exceed the sum of inflows from foreign aid ($13 per Nigerian), foreign investment ($6), and home remittances by expatriate workers ($11) by nearly double ($58 lost vs. $30 gained per Nigerian). For every dollar of aid money, foreign investment and expatriate Nigerian workers' earnings sent back to Nigeria, two dollars is fleeing the country for foreign bank accounts. Restricting the time window to only the 2000s, the situation is even worse: for every $66 annually entering Nigeria in aid, investment and remittances, $132 has exited via capital flight.

For every dollar of aid money, foreign investment and expatriate Nigerian workers' earnings sent back to Nigeria, two dollars is fleeing the country for foreign bank accounts. By contrast, for the other eight nations, illicit capital flight is one-tenth to one-half the sum of the other three inflows; for every dollar that is stolen out of those countries' economies, between two and ten dollars enters the country in aid, investment and remittances. The temptation for squandering and diversion is simply too great when entry and exit taps are controlled by a tiny minority. This is not to paint all African leaders as corrupt diverters of international development assistance, as is apparently the perception of some readers, based on comments posted to the Globe and Mail article "Stephen Harper does the UN" by Gerald Caplan (September 17, 2010) "Stephen Harper does the UN" (17 September 2010). The economic welfare of Russian, Venezuelan, Algerian, Syrian, Guyanese and Gabonese societies too may be impaired by their extreme dependence on oil exports: "GNI is too low in these countries in the sense that they are achieving extremely low rates of return on their produced, human, and institutional capital. This is a classic symptom of the resource curse..." (World Bank. 2006. "Where Is The Wealth Of Nations? Measuring Capital for the 21st Century", p. 29).

Each country's individual performance prediction is tabulated below by each goal.

In 2010, the United Nations Development Programme published hybrid Human Development Index (HDI) indicators covering the period from 1970 to 2010. By this measure, Nigeria's development performance was much more typical of its African peers than from the Millennium Development Goals examined above. Within the nine-nation African cohort, Nigeria's hybrid HDI rose from fifth-highest in 1970 (0.297) to fourth-highest in 2010 (0.478). When separated into the three components over these four decades, Nigeria went from a rank of fifth to third for Education (combined primary, secondary and tertiary level enrolment), from second to first for Income (the logarithm of income per capita), while remaining third-lowest for Health (life expectancy).