He didn’t fancy the word “summit”. Similarly, “conference” or “dialogue”did not also seem appropriate to him.And so, he settled for “retreat”, which was a smart way to go to avoid dissent. Smartly also, he tied the retreat to the aprons of the National Economic Council, NEC, a body of governors which he, as Vice President, chairs.
Read the insider’s account of how the government of All Progressives Congress, APC, may be searching for new economic ideas.
Unless the Federal Government of the All Progressive Congress, APC, agrees that something is wrong with its party’s manifesto, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo would have the Herculean task of telling to Nigerians the reason for the two-day retreat of the National Economic Council, NEC, held last week.
Like a building plan, the manifesto of a political party is the template, the compass, the thought-out plan upon which the ship of governance is steered. But in the case of APC, there appears to be a question mark.
It is like the party, through its government, is currently fishing for ideas to chart an economic direction or, better still, sell some ideas it already has. And so, to actualize this, the meeting, nay the retreat, was convoked.
But yet again, the Vice President is a clever man. With the employment of retreat, he was able to pull together all state governors irrespective of their political leanings.
In attendance were the 22 governors of the APC, 13 governors of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and one All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, governor. In the same vein, he brought in members of the Federal Executive Council, FEC, for the retreat. NEC and FEC are two different streams.
While the NEC has the Vice President, state governors and the CBN governor as members, FEC has the President, his Vice, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, and the ministers as members.
To further accentuate his dream, Osinbajo assigned special task to the Chairman of the Governors Forum and governor of Zamfara State, Abdulazz Yari. The VP’s office had earlier in a statement announced the objective of the retreat: “The objective of the NEC retreat is to provide a forum for in-depth discussions on the policy actions which States and the Federal Government can consider in order to stimulate local production, cut costs and enhance public revenues among other measures aimed at stimulating the economy.”
For some critics of the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, the two-day event, held at the old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, between last Monday and Tuesday, created certain impressions. One: Where is the APC manifesto? Two: What has gone wrong with the government? Three: Were they fishing for ideas to run the government and informing other co-drivers of the economy of the harsh economic realities of the present time and the need to take proactive measures?
Apart from its persistence on the anti-corruption and anti-terrorism wars, the government, many think, has vacillated on the economy and country’s prosperity plans.
Buhari at the meeting Buhari delivered the keynote address at the retreat. He identified some major challenges bedeviling the country.
To the President, electricity was one issue clogging the wheel of progress. Aware of this, Buhari announced that his government would work to boost power generation capacity to at least 3,500 mega watts before the end of the year.
Over all, he pledged to reach 10,000 megawatts by 2019. Other key areas the President challenged the retreat on included: Agriculture, housing, manufacturing and healthcare.
The first, which came from the Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, was that N350 billion would be injected into the economy to rebound it as soon as the 2016 national budget comes into effect. She said: “We deliberated extensively on the drop in revenue particularly as to how it affects the state government and their ability to pay salaries and obligations.
The general resolve of the house and consensus was that there was a need to bring in more cost efficiency in their operations. In particular to look at the setting up of the efficiency unit within the state governments, to rationalise expenditure and of course to increase IGR. To that end, there was a need to generate data because data is the basis of any revenue collecting efforts.
“The Federal and state inland revenue services collaborate to do joint audits to invest in revenue, relevant technology and efforts to improve collection. There is a need to develop incentives for both federal and state revenue generating agencies to ensure that there is an alignment of interest.
There is a focus at state level on property and consumption taxes to help in improving revenue in a fair manner. Tax payer education must be intensified and to expand the tax base and ensure that there is a buy-in in the revenue collection agencies from the populace.
“State governors were encouraged where possible to rationalize numbers of commissioners and general political appointees and in addition cost control measures to be identified and implemented on an on-going basis and there was a sharing of best practices from a number of states that could be applied elsewhere.
“From the federal ministry of finance in anticipation of the approval of the budget , we have virtually lined up about N350billion which we would be pumping into the Nigerian economy in the forth coming months.
We explained our rational and the processes that we have put in place, safe guards to ensure that this money actually achieves the desired objective which is to stimulate the economy. “We are already discussing with some of the contractors who will be paid these monies and the objectives from the overall criteria is how many Nigerians would be re-engaged.
We are specifically looking at contractors who have laid off staff and how many Nigerians are you going to put back to work as a result of this money that we are planning to release and we believe that this would bring significant economic activity”.
The retreat also discussed the condition of the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC, saying that there was current plan to get a legislative approval and also access N58 billion Naira to rehabilitate the worst classroom.
“We also discussed UBEC and the need to get legislative approval to change the need for counterpart funding on the part of state governments which we feel is putting them further into debt, to reduce that requirement from a temporary period to 10% from the current 50% and that will release an estimated 58 billion Naira that is currently un-accessed and it was discussed that with that money we could possibly address around 1,000 of the worst classrooms in each of the 36 states and rehabilitate them and of course this would also create jobs and economic activity”, she said. On a similar note, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udo Udoma, stated that the NEC had resolved to focus on agriculture.
He said: “At this retreat, we resolved to work together, the federal government and the state to meet the challenges of the economy. We resolved to look at the immediate ways of increasing revenues at the states as well as the federal level. “We resolved that we will concentrate our effort in diversifying revenue sources particularly, we will concentrate on revamping agriculture which is key.
We resolved to set national target for self-sufficiency in a number of identified crops. “We also resolved that working toegther with the states that by the end of 2018, we will be self-sufficient in rice.
That means we are going to expand rice cultivation in very many states to ensure that we can achieve that by 2018. We also resolve that we will work together to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat production in 2019.
“Each state government is encouraged to identify at least two agricultural crops in which they have comparative advantage and will open up rural and feeder roads to facilitate transportation of agricultural produce.
“We also resolved that the Ministry of Solid Minerals will complete and present the solid minerals development raod maps. This framework will address the issues of illegal mining, licences, taxes and royalties and these we presented at the 31 of march 2016.
“We also resolve to increase investment in infrastructure and to explore public private partnership to resolve this.” Infrastructure and human investment were also two major issues at the retreat, according to Anambra State governor, Willie Obiano.
“In infrastructure and services, both federal and state governments would collaborate to develop infrastructure delivery plan considering current financial capabilities driven principally by the goal of improvement of the quality of life for the populace; develop financing model for infrastructure projects; integrate training and job creation components in infrastructure projects; implement empowerment and entrepreneurship policies to foster inclusive growth”, Obiano stated Investing in our people “Federal and state governments to work collaboratively to ensure sustainability of the school feeding and other social protection programmes; Cooperation from the States’ Ministries of Education and State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEBs) for the Teacher Corp program; Provide logistics support on the proposed upgrade of 75 existing National Directorate of Employment (NDE) facilities (across the various States) to Empowerment Centers; Cooperation and coordination with the States on their specific job creation efforts “Stategovernment support on identified needs such as infrastructure and/or space for innovation hubs; support for artisan training, scoping and support for existing artisan cultures, use of existing training facilities; institutionalize a single register as a platform for targeting the authentic poorest and vulnerable for safety net programs; for government, donor agency, organizations or individuals; and creating a delivery mechanism that ensures efficient, consistent timely and direct payments in the remotest parts of the country; boost productivity and financial inclusion for the poorest and most vulnerable”.
Kudos and knocks Sunday Vanguard spoke with the governors of Delta and Ekiti States as well as some other Nigerians on the likely impact of the retreat. It was rewarding—Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, Delta State governor
We had the ministers and some other guests talking to us concerning the plan of action of the federal government and how they think they can partner with the States.
It also gave us the opportunity to interact with each other and I also think that it is important going in that direction because we need to create a common course between the federal government and the government at the lower level and I think that what we took through yesterday is good enough and some of our colleagues felt there was a need to have invited persons from the private sector to speak to us.
Not actually to be part of the process but to speak to us so that we would have a good understanding about the business climate and how it could be improved.
Essentially, going down through the first day, we had a rewarding day. Economy is on tenterhooks—Mr. Yusuf Ali, SAN I am optimist. I pray we derive benefit from it. We can’t afford to be slip shod about our economy now. We are on economic tenterhooks.
I do not attach much value to it -Dr. Chekwas Okorie, National Chairman, United Progressives Party, UPP I have not paid much attention to the ongoing NEC retreat mainly because I do not attach much value to it in terms of the capacity to provide feasible and robust economic road map and agenda.
It doesn’t matter the nomenclature the event bore. What matters most is the result of such meetings.
Now, that quite a number of resolutions had been reached, Nigerians anxiously await their concrete implementations especially in the president Buhari’s promise of increasing the megawatts of electricity.
Otherwise, the retreat may have ended up as a talk shop, raising questions on whether APC ever had a manifesto.
(Vanguar)
