Minister of State for Budget and National Panning, Prince Clem Ikanade Agba, on Thursday, shed more light on the ambitious targets of Nigeria’s new National Development Plan (NDP) which was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) penultimate Wednesday.
Agba said in a keynote address at the African Statistics Day in Nigeria hosted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), one of the agencies, departments and parastatals under his ministry, that the new NDP would in the next five years generate about 21 million full-time jobs and lift at least 35 million Nigerians out of poverty.
THE CONCLAVE reports that the lifting of at least 35 million Nigerians from poverty, which the Plan is set to achieve in five years aligns with the desire of President Muhammadu Buhari to lift 100 million Nigerians from poverty in ten years.
The minister stated that the NDP was planned to, in addition, achieve a broad-based economic growth of about 5% on the average, pointing out that it was expected that national government net revenue at all levels would increase to 15 percent of GDP by 2025.
Agba said that the NDP (3021-2025) was to guide government’s policies, programmes and projects as well as private sector operations from now to 2025, adding that these would be inspired by the perspective plan-Nigeria Agenda 2050, which, according to him, encapsulated “our long-term vision for Nigeria.”
He said: “The Plan seeks to achieve these laudable goals in the medium term by expanding economic growth, growing an inclusive economy, leveraging its young workforce and enhancing execution capacity at the national and sub-national levels.”
Agba, who supervised and coordinated the preparation of the NDP, continued: “The National Development Plan [NDP 2021 – 2025] and Nigeria Agenda 2050 [NA 2050] are the Nigerian home-grown Medium and Long-Terms National Development Plans developed to succeed the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan [ERGP 2017 – 2020] and Nigeria Vision 2020 [NV20:2020] both of which ended in December 2020.”
He added: “The NDP 2021 – 2025 envisions Nigeria being a leading industrializing and reforming nation in Africa, that will focus on building its institutional capacity and capability as well as bolstering a private sector-led growth to help address the critical issues of job and wealth creation and poverty reduction.
“Nigeria has an enabling investment climate and business environment, underpinned by a motivated, capacitated, well-resourced, world-class civil service that drives open, transparent, high-performance governance at all levels.
“The country is now moving decisively towards the reforms required to unlock local content development, sub-national economic diversification, competitiveness and growth, making moderate, incremental progress in poverty reduction and job creation in the medium-term.”
The minister hinted at a significant role for the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in the implementation of the NDP, announcing on the occasion that “included in the approved plan is a robust strategy on data production and coordination. The plan recognized that data is the lifeblood of fact-based policy decision-making and the raw material for accountability.
“Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right time; designing, monitoring, and effectively evaluating policy implementation outcomes becomes almost impossible.
“The key objectives and targets are regular funding for NBS and National Statistical System (NSS), increased coordination and harmonization of data across all levels and capacity building and development within the NSS.
“The strategies are the establishment of the Nigerian Statistical Trust Fund (NSTF) and the full implementation of the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS).”
The minister took the opportunity of the occasion to commend the NBS, the apex statistical agency in Nigeria, for acting in collaboration with other data producing agencies, to put in place necessary infrastructure in an effort to modernize the National Statistical System (NSS), stressing that “this is in an effort to facilitate the production of basic statistical information capable of meeting the expectations of the nation.”
He also spoke of the new web application, christened the “Eye Mark”, that is about 90 percent developed, with which the Ministry of Budget and National Planning would monitor and evaluate federal government’s capital projects across the country as well as ensure citizens’ participation in project monitoring.
He said when launched, the app could be downloaded on mobile phones with which Nigerians could monitor execution of projects sited in their communities and reports progress, action or inaction on awarded capital projects to the Federal Government which, over the years, has been earmarking money for projects.
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