Veritatis Gaudium: Multidisciplinary Journal of Postgraduate Studies

It is a generally accepted fact that public policies, as their name suggests, are targeted at members of the public, and as such, the people necessarily have to be the agents, means, and end of policies. In view of this truism, policies like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which are poised to ‘achieve a better and more sustainable future for all people and the world by 2030’, require the participation of all stakeholders across countries of the world. This can be made possible if a system that guarantees the active participation of the people is implemented and sustained. The study was exploratory and relied mostly on secondary data, which were analysed descriptively. Therefore, the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is realistic if democratic governance, which guarantees people’s rights and creates an enabling environment for people to get actively and meaningfully involved in their own affairs, is implemented, promoted, and purposively sustained. Nigeria claims to practice democracy, but tenets like respect for people’s inalienable rights, justice, accountability, transparency, etc., which are the hallmarks of democratic governance, are almost nonexistent. This paper therefore underscored the critical role of democracy in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Nigeria and advanced that the slide to democratic decline seriously threatens the realization of the UNSDGs by African countries. The paper therefore recommended the entrenchment of democratic institutions, tenets, and principles in order to guarantee wide participation by the majority of the citizenry.

Open Full Text (PDF)