A direct appeal to President Bola Tinubu on domestication of Agenda 2063

This is a direct appeal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to harness all the powers vested in him as the executive president and commander-in-chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to set in motion all the processes that will lead to the full domestication of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the enthronement of formal national development planning by the Federal Executive Council as a matter of utmost national importance for the development and realisation of the fullest potential of the Nigerian economy.

The reasons this direct appeal to President Tinubu has become necessary are as follows:

1) Nigeria is in dire economic straits, and President Tinubu is the only one who can muster the required political will to address the challenges through formal national development planning and domestication of Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

2) The President’s courageous effort to reset the Nigerian economy through the liberalisation of the foreign exchange market, the downstream oil and gas market, and the electricity market is commendable but cannot produce the full benefit of accelerated growth and development of the economy without formal development planning and domestication of Agenda 2063 and full implementation of the SDGs.

3) The size of the Nigerian economy, our population, which is the largest in Africa and the 6th largest in the world, and our position as the largest oil-producing country in Africa make us a pivotal economy to the realisation of the goals of Agenda 2063/”One Framework, Two Agendas.” Nigeria’s full adoption/domestication and implementation of these two continental and global agendas will send the right signal for other African countries to do likewise and ensure their full realisation.

4). President Bola Tinubu, as the Chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is our Regional Economic Community (REC), means Nigeria has to lead by example in the domestication of Agenda 2063 and the full implementation of the SDGs by ECOWAS member states.

“The most potent strategy to use to fight poverty and spread prosperity in Africa is a pan-African endeavour, which is what the African Union Agenda 2063/’One Framework, Two Agendas’ represents.”

Other reasons why this direct appeal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has become necessary are as follows:

1) Nigeria cannot domesticate Agenda 2063 and the “One Framework, Two Agendas” development template without going back to formal medium-term development planning, which we have abandoned for decades.

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2) The key development strategy that highly populated Asian countries like China, Indonesia, and India have used to bridge the development gap between them and the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America is 5-yearly, medium-term development plans. China, for example, has had 14 consistent 5-year development plans beginning with the 1953-1957 plan and has so much transformed its economy from $306bn in 1980 to $18,273bn in Q4 (fourth quarter) 2024, a sixty-fold increase, making her the second largest economy in the world. China’s GDP was only five times larger than Nigeria’s in 1980. Now it is 91 times larger! Nigeria’s GDP has contracted from $574bn in 2014 to $200bn in Q4 2024, in US dollar terms, due largely to the abandonment and lack of political commitment to mission-driven 5-yearly national development planning.

3) The domestication of Agenda 2063/”One Framework, Two Agendas” will ensure accelerated development of the Nigerian economy and the achievement of the SDGs, where Nigeria recorded a poor performance of 146 out of 166 countries in the SDG Index in 2023.

For the avoidance of doubt, Nigeria, like most African countries, has “formally domesticated Agenda 2063” but has not implemented it as a template for national development planning. In my article of last week titled, “Domestication of Agenda 2063 and implications for national development planning in Nigeria,” five reasons were given why Nigeria needs to domesticate Agenda 2063, which are summarised as follows:

1) The merging of the goals of Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the African Union and the United Nations into “One Framework, Two Agendas,” thereby enabling Nigeria and other African countries to achieve both global and continental agendas simultaneously;

2) the need for Nigeria and other African countries to adopt Agenda 2063’s Seven Aspirations; and their corresponding Seven Moonshots in the Second Ten-Year Implementation Plan of Agenda 2063; 3) the need for Nigeria and other African countries to adopt Agenda 2063’s continental planning frameworks for sectoral development planning;

4) the need for Nigeria and other African countries to align their medium-term (5-yearly) national development plans (NDPs) with the 10-yearly implementation plans of Agenda 2063, which is in its Second Ten Year Implementation Plan (STYIP) now; and

5) the need for Nigeria and other African countries to adopt the planning, implementation monitoring and evaluation templates of the STYIP to enable them to deliver their national development plans with better results.

Africa has a daunting challenge to benchmark China in taking hundreds of millions of Africans out of poverty in record time. In 2024, 429 million Africans are living in extreme poverty, which is about a third of the continent’s population.

The most potent strategy to use to fight poverty and spread prosperity in Africa is a pan-African endeavour, which is what the African Union Agenda 2063/“One Framework, Two Agendas” represents. The domestication of the agendas by every African country is the strategic last-mile effort required to ensure the full realisation of the laudable aspirations, goals, and objectives of the agendas across the board from Cape to Cairo and from Dakar to Mombasa.

Nigeria has both a historical and a geopolitical role to play in repositioning Africa to realize Agenda 2063—“The Africa We Want.” Our president must lead the charge.