The Millennium Development Goals, Social Transformation and the Civil Society in Nigeria*
"Human development is first and foremost about allowing people to lead a life that they value and enabling them to realize their potential as human beings" – UNDP 2006, Human Development Report Introduction The human race has come a long way from its humble beginnings when men and women were primitive gatherers of fruits, hardly understanding nature, not to talk of mastering it. Over the last three millennia, humankind has come to transform its environment and as well itself. Empires have arisen and fallen, so much wealth has been created by labour and several social-economic formations have been forged only to crumble. The last two hundred years after the industrial revolution, first in Britain however mark the historic leap of the possibilities of human development. In these centuries of the modern industrial society, more wealth has been created than that created in the preceding three thousand. Large-scale manufacture as the heart of industrial production has created mor...