President Buhari's 2022 New Year's Day speech just has to be simple and modest. All he needs to do is set Nigeria the soft target of catching up with several other developing nations in a few vital areas

Ayo Akinfe

[1] We will boost generated electricity from the current 7,000MW to South Africa’s 50,000MW

[2] This government will increase the kilometres of tarred roads from the current 200,000km to South Africa’s 750,000km

[3] Between now and when we leave office, we will increase the length of our railway network from the current 4,000km to Pakistan’s 8,000km

[4] By April 2022, we will increase our literacy rate from the current 60% to Brazil’s 91.7%

[5] This government will boost steel production from the current zero level to Egypt’s 7m tonnes

[6] We will increase sugar production from the current 37,500 tonnes to the 762,000 tonnes of Sudan

[7] This government will increase annual rice production from the current 7m tonnes tonnes to Thailand’s 32m tonnes

[8] We will boost palm oil production from the current 1.4m tonnes to Malaysia’s 19m tonnes

[9] Nigeria will increase her natural rubber production from the current 150,000 tonnes to India’s 900,000 tonnes

[10] We will set ourselves the long term goal of increasing the ratio of hospital beds from the current 0.5 per 1,000 people to the Turkish level of 2.7 per 1,000 people

We are supposed to be a Mint country made up of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey and a member of the D8 leading developing eight countries. The D8 is made up of Iran, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Egypt and Nigeria, so our standards should always match up.

At the moment, we are lagging behind in too many areas. As you can see, I have not compared Nigeria with any industrial giant like Germany, Japan, France or the UK but I do not think it is too much to ask that we keep up with other developing nations.