EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF NIGERIA'S PRESIDENTIAL ECONOMIC POLICIES ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A POST-2015 ANALYSIS
Dr. Bassey Moses Ogar
Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2025
This study assessed Nigeria's post-2015 economic policies, the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (2017-2020), Nigeria Economic Sustainability Plan (2020-2025), and National Development Plan (2021-2025) on the achievement of sustainable development goals. The study used quantitative methods to analyse macroeconomic data and qualitative methods to evaluate implementation processes to determine the policy impact on diversification, poverty, employment and infrastructure development. Research has shown that there has been a noticeable discrepancy regarding the execution of policies, revealing minor achievement in macroeconomic stabilisation but a failure in core development issues. The study also revealed the positive trends in the role of the agricultural sector in the GDP and development of the digital environment. On the one hand, the negative trends in the poverty indicators boosted inequality and increased the unemployment rate. At the regional level, the distribution of the policies' impacts revealed that the North fared much worse than the South in each development indicator. Some emerging challenges that hindered policy implementation were a lack of institutional capacity, policy coordination mechanisms, limited capacity within monitoring systems, governance barriers and inadequate coping with external shocks. These included more coherent policies, better implementation, revised governance architectures, and domestic economic policies focusing on distributional effects to turn Nigeria's policy vision into a realistic development aspiration.