When the United Nations Organisation turned three scores and half, many voices across the world called for it to be scrapped, it has not lived up to the spirit on which it was founded, the voices complained in part. True, humanity has not experienced the much dreaded World War 111, but the agony unleashed on mankind by the innumerable proxy wars that have come in its stead are just as dreadful as a global war.

Pointing to both the composition of the organisation and the policies it has pursued since 1945, most knowing commentators have suggested that the UN was set up primarily for the interests of the Global North. Much of post-1945 history gives credence to this claim.

Perhaps the time is ripe for the Global South, more so Africa to don her thinking cap? An objective look at a recent policy of the UN is appropriate. Under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Nigeria’s Environmental Laws, project-developers are required to enhance the socio-economics of adjoining communities.

Specifically, the costs of uplifting the living standards of such communities are to be fully captured under Project Total Cost, rather than subsumed under Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR). The difference thereof cannot be overemphasised.

On the one hand, under CSR project-promoters assume the airs of a Santa Claus (Father Christmas) of sorts, choosing at will the scale and type of communities-related projects to execute. More often than not such projects, better termed tokens, rarely uplift the living standards of the affected communities. Rather alarmingly, the converse has been the documented evidence as development activities negatively impact environmental and human baseline data.

On the other hand, SDGs mandate project-promoters to build communities infrastructure alongside their primary projects, with a view to stimulating the local economy. Adequate provisions are also to be made for the sustained maintenance of such communities’ infrastructure. Where necessary whole communities are relocated to realise SDGs objectives; examples abound in the Global North.

Most recently, the world witnessed how comprehensive relocation redevelopment projects were executed for European urban and rural communities to create spaces for airports expansion, rail lines extensions, solar panels and wind turbine farms.

In the Global South one needs not look beyond the squalor that best describes local communities in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region and the Congo copper belt to come to grips with the determined attitudes of Africa’s international partners.

Tokenism rules the hearts of the latter: as in Nigeria’s linear extraction of hydrocarbons so also it is in the Congo’s exploitation of copper sans value addition, all in gross violation of the SDGs. We might as well observe, in violation of the basic laws of economics; viz, a) extraction of rents sans value addition inexorably leads to economic exhaustion; b) for maximum economic value, value addition should be proximate to raw materials extraction site.

As though the foregoing scenario is not confounding enough, the offshore produced byproducts of those raw materials are subsequently imported into Nigeria and the Congo respectively with scarce foreign currencies(!!)

Meanwhile no concrete thought had been sparedfor the impact of those unscrupulous exploitations on the local communities and the environment. How better to illustrate double jeopardy! The evident purpose of Africa’s international partners is maximum extraction of profits, even at the detriment of whole communities and the environment.

No less an authoritative organisation than the World Bank a couple of decades previously, concluded that the aforesaid trajectory is the reason why the Global South has continued to slide down the slippery hills of abject poverty. Consequently, in conjunction with other global bodies inclusive of the United Nations, the World Bank floated the sustainable development agenda.

Africa has yet to effectively draw from that pool(!) Continental Africa must of necessity now call out her international partners for flagrantly defaulting on both the letter and the spirit of the much advertised Sustainable Development Goals. This is all the more so because rural communities constitute the bulk of Africa’s multi-billion population.

Thus far Africa’s articulate class has been painfully remiss in rising to the occasion. Instead, the media, the academia, activists groups, e.t.c inundate the airwaves with superficial criticisms of the respective governments of their countries. This is all to the good though, what with the recurrent allegations of poor governance and brazen corruption that are associated with most African leaders. But Africa’s articulate class misses an essential point: governments hardly constitute 30 per cent of a national economy(!!) 70 per cent of the national economy is private, both native and international.

If Africa’s economic fortunes must change for the better, the interrogative lenses need to shift. By all means interrogate governments and their officials as much as is deemed appropriate, but more crucially, the executives of the private entities controlling approximately 70 per cent of Africa’s economy also need to be grilled in public space.

Ordinary Africans deserve to know how the corporate policies of those private bodies compare with global best practices in general, and Sustainable Development Goals in particular.
Nkemdiche is a consulting engineer.