By Sonala Olumhense, May 24, 2026
On February 12, in Abuja, the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, delivered a sweeping address at the LEADERSHIP Group’s annual conference on “Political Stability and Sustainable Development in Africa: A Road Map For Nigeria.”
She spoke of social contracts, inclusive economies, climate resilience, and democratic foundations.
Mohammed praised Nigeria’s “vibrant independent media.” She cited IMF and World Bank growth projections. She invoked Tafawa Balewa.
It was a masterclass in what I once called image-laundering, the deployment of international prestige to validate a government’s self-description, dressed in the neutral language of multilateral aspiration.
The difference from the version I usually critique is that this time, the launderer did not travel to New York; the laundry came to Abuja.
I would not raise this issue were Amina Mohammed a stranger to Nigeria’s development story. But she is, in fact, one of its most consequential and least-examined protagonists.
In 2005, President Olusegun Obasanjo established the Office of the Senior Special Adviser to the President on Millennium Development Goals, OSSAP-MDGs, and appointed Amina Az-Zubair, now Mohammed, to run it.
Her mandate was to supervise $1 billion per year in Paris Club debt relief savings, committed by Nigeria to achieving the MDGs. She served six years, overseeing what was, by 2011, $6 billion in development funds.
Nigeria missed virtually every MDG target.
But that is not the worst of it. Amina Mohammed herself established a Monitoring and Evaluation unit within OSSAP-MDGs to ensure accountability. That unit found that between 2006 and 2008 alone, various government agencies “mismanaged” most of the N320 billion allocated to them.
Think about that: N180 billion per annum. A separate investigation found that the Ministry of Health alone squandered most of the N54 billion it received within that period.
These are not my findings. They are hers.
When The Economist subsequently declared the Millennium Villages scheme she championed a failure, Mohammed fired back in the Huffington Post, insisting Nigeria was “using the billion dollars per annum that it receives in debt relief” to reach tens of millions of Nigerians through 113 local governments, poised to cover all 774 LGAs by 2015.
One decade later, nobody has produced the evidence, the projects, the documents, the communities, demonstrating that $10 billion was actually spent as she described.
In 2016, I asked a simple question in this column: if Nigeria spent the MDG money, why did it do so poorly, and what exactly did we achieve? I directed it at Mohammed personally: “Help us, Amina!”
She did not help us.
Instead, Amina Mohammed went to the UN, was appointed Deputy Secretary-General, and became the architect of the SDGs, the very framework she recommended as the corrective to the MDG failures she had presided over.
I warned in 2016 that the MDGs’ accumulated debt-relief savings would reach $20 billion by 2026. That year is now here. Yet, nobody has ever demanded, or produced, a transparent accounting of what happened to the first $10 billion.
So when Mohammed tells a Nigerian audience that stable societies rest on ensuring “those who hold power are held accountable for how they use it,” she is articulating, with perfect clarity, the standard she has never herself met.
It is preaching without practice.
And when Amina Mohammed praises Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s N330 billion cash transfer programme as “the beginning of a social contract being honoured,” she is endorsing a programme built on the same architecture she designed, one whose most recent iteration produced the Betta Edu scandal, in which grants meant for the poor were allegedly directed into a minister’s private account within just two years of the programme’s launch.
Edu did not go to jail. We pretend it never happened. That is the Nigerian standard.
Which brings me to the UN itself, whose silence on all this appears institutional. The UN has built Mohammed’s second career on credentials whose Nigerian foundation remains forensically unexamined.
It dispatched her to Abuja to validate a government’s governance trajectory barely eight months before a consequential election, without a word on INEC’s independence, the Electoral Act’s documented loopholes, or the formal warnings by organisations such as International IDEA and Centre for Democracy and Development over threats to the 2027 elections. The UN praised Nigeria’s free press while remaining silent on the NBC’s regulatory pressure on independent broadcasters.
Clearly, that is diplomatic cover, not development partnership, delivered in the vocabulary of sustainable development.
The UN was founded, as Mohammed herself reminded us, on the principle that rules must protect the many rather than reward the very few. It is a principle worth applying to the stewardship of Nigerian public funds by its own second-highest official. If the UN cannot demand accountability within its own ranks, it has little standing to prescribe accountability to others.
The SDG deadline is 2030, four years away. For the same reasons Nigeria fell short of the MDGs, it remains nowhere near its current targets.
Although speeches continue to multiply, the question I asked in 2016 remains unanswered: the $20 billion has been spent, yet no questions have been asked.
Nigeria stands as a stark demonstration of how much the UN, where I worked at the Security Council in 2000 when the Millennium Declaration was adopted, has lost its moral compass and metamorphosed into a symbol of betrayal and hypocrisy.
That is why the UN offers bland statements in and on Nigeria, but ignores such critical issues as:
- The government’s insecurity collapse;
- The emerging single-party nightmare (the European Union has);
- N800bn being diverted from the Federation Account to finance the re-election bid of President Bola Tinubu;
- The ethnic capture of Nigeria’s economy, or
- The worldwide consternationarising from Clause 60(3) of Nigeria’s New Electoral Law.
According to the numbers, or lack of them, the UN appears to be shrinking so swiftly that for the first time in its history, it is not hiring a single soul.
If what it is doing in Nigeria is what it is doing around the world, it is, contrary to the Millennium Declaration, on the side of the few and the fat, not the many and the miserable; it is propping up despots and autocrats, not the vulnerable and the hungry; it is enthroning impunity and corruption, not lighting a light or investing in hope.
There is no road map; it means that, in the 30 years between the Millennium Declaration and the projected end of the SDGs, the UN has morphed into an undertaker.
Official and institutional focus shifted instead toward self-serving speeches.
Not example.
Not service.
Not accountability.
A true map always begins from right here.
Sonala Olumhense is a syndicated columnist