Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Prince Clem Ikanade Agba, said that the National Development Plan (NDP) 2021-‘2025 would ensure and deliver concentric diversification of the Nigerian economy.
Agba spoke on Monday in London on the sidelines of the 7th bi-annual meeting of the UK-Nigeria Economic Development Forum.
Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Otunba Niyi Adebayo is also in attendance at the meeting.
Agba said that in developing the NDP, the Organised Private Sector (OPS) was made to lead because “it drives the Nigerian economy.”
According to him: “What we did as government was just to facilitate that Plan and the vision of that Plan is to unlock the potential that we have in the various sectors of the economy in terms of the key objectives of the Plan which, first and foremost, is to ensure and deliver concentric diversification of our economy.
“I used the word concentric diversification because a lot of people still think Nigerian economy is mono dependent. Yes, it was mono dependent four years ago but today, the Nigeria economy is already diversified.
“Oil, which used to be the main source of revenue in the last couple of months, has not contributed anything to national revenue.
“We are running our economy on the non-oil sector and if the economy is running on non-oil sector, we will be wrong to say Nigeria is a mono dependent economy.”
The minister also explained that the Nigerian government was looking at Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to drive the economy.
“Secondly, then we are looking at MSMEs to drive the economy. They are the largest employers of labour.
“The NDP envisages that we create 21 million jobs. If 21 million jobs are created, we expect to take 35 million people out of poverty within the planned period.”
He added: “The plan looks at agriculture differently and looks at integrated rural development because the vast majority of our people and these people who represent about 55 percent of Nigerians produce 90 percent of the food that is grown and one big problem with Agriculture in Nigeria which is an opportunity for the private sector is the fact that our post-harvest losses are so high.
“The losses are about 60 percent. So you can imagine that about 10,000 tons of food that are produced, 6000 tons go to waste and that is a low hanging fruit for anyone to take advantage of.
“That is why our plan is putting a lot of emphasis on integrated rural area development where we now begin to take infrastructure to the rural areas not just road infrastructure, I am talking of communication and digital infrastructure to the rural areas.
“Power is an issue and because of the (issues with) national grid, we are now concentrating on taking off-grid power to the rural areas.
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