Wither agenda after hibernation?

When a visitor with a defined period of stay at a place waited until few moments to his departure before attending to some of the real issues that brought him there, questions should be asked to know why he had to wait and remain idle until the eleventh hour. Was he sleeping all the while and only remembered his assignment after rising from hibernation? Some actions of the federal government in recent times plausibly suggest a sudden rouse from hibernation.

Hibernation is a subconscious condition of the mind and “a state of minimal activity and metabolic depression undergone by some animal species.” Although it is not known to be characteristic of or natural with humans, scientists believe that the ability to hibernate would be useful to humans for a number of reasons including saving the lives of seriously ill or injured people by temporarily putting them in a state of hibernation until treatment can be given.

Rising recently from an emergency session and its first meeting this year (2023), the National Economic Council (NEC) endorsed the “Nigeria Agenda 2050” designed to take the country through to Upper Middle-Income Country and subsequently to the status of High-Income countries. The Agenda 2050 was presented by the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning to State Governors and other members of NEC including federal ministers at a meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

Speaking after the presentation of the agenda, Prof Osinbajo noted that the plan “captures a lot of the expectations for Nigeria in the future.” Also commenting on the Agenda 2050, the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Prince Agba, said the federal government has taken unprecedented steps in ensuring the operationalization of the plan especially with the inauguration of the Steering Committee of the National Development Plan by the Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.

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Highlights of Nigeria’s Agenda 2050 as presented to NEC include its being a perspective plan designed to transform the country into an “Upper-Middle Income Country”, with a significant improvement in per capita income. Proponents of the agenda say it aims to fully engage all available resources, reduce poverty, achieve social and economic stability. To reduce unemployment, inequality, and human deprivation, 165m full-time jobs will be created by the Agenda. Also, the Nigeria Agenda 2050 envisages an annual average real GDP growth of 7.0 per cent. It also projects that the number of people in poverty will decline from the roughly 83 million in 2020 to about 47.8 million in 2025 and to 2.1 million by 2050; thus, taking a significant segment of the population out of poverty.

It would be recalled that the Minister of State, Budget and National Planning, Prince Agba, at a virtually meeting in July 2020 inaugurated a Central Working Group (CWG) for the Development of the “Nigeria Agenda 2050” and Medium-Term National Development Plan (MTNDP 2021-2025) in Abuja. On 9th September, 2020, President Muhammadu Buhari inaugurated the National Steering Committee (NSC) for the preparation of the Medium-Term National Development Plan (MTNDP) 2021-2025 and Nigeria Agenda 2050. By design, the MTNDP is expected to succeed Nigeria’s Vision 20:2020 and the Economic Recovery and Growth Plans (ERGP) that terminated in December, 2020. But, was government justified to have spent a period as long as two months just to inaugurate the CWG and the NSC?

Although “Agenda 2050” was conceived to be a long-term perspective plan, the over two and half years it took the CWG to produce the plan is a period this writer considers long enough for the implementation of the Agenda to have even gone far. Could it be that the policy document was submitted but government had no time to do what it is now doing? If this was the case, it simply points to how Nigeria’s development and its future did not matter to government; ironically in a country that has in over three decades remained in dire need of a strategic national development agenda.

Government was busy telling Nigerians that “Agenda 2050” is a better replacement of the Vision 20:2020 programme as well as the ERGP without accounting for the successes or failures of the implementation of the two economic plans. Government is saying the “Agenda 2050” is expected to guide its economic intervention initiatives up to the target year with a view to placing the country as the third most populous country in the world when the Nigeria’s population would have hit 400 million according to World Bank projections, the same government has refused to tell us whether the country’s Vision 20:2020 goal of making Nigeria one of the 20 largest economies in the world by the year 2020 was realised or not.

Is this how Nigeria would continue to launch one economic development plan after the other without any history of remarkable achievements? Are development agendas meant for safe preservation in file cabinets in offices or for full implementation that would solve the country’s obstinate challenges? Seven months after President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in as Nigeria’s democratically-elected President, this column published a piece on this page in this newspaper’s edition of Saturday December 26, 2015 with the title “Give national development plan a thought”. In that piece, the imperatives for a national development agenda as well as a chronicle of past development plans since Nigeria’s independence were all examined.

Believing that government is continuous, the rush by this administration at the tail end of its 8-year-tenure (of two terms) to introduce at the speed of sound and execute at the speed of light ‘lofty’ ideas including the recent launch of “Agenda 2050” portrays it as a government that suddenly regained consciousness after a 7-year hibernation. Were the “Agenda 2050” and even the naira re-design policy (both of which are well-intentioned) initiated long before now, they would have made the administration more popular than those before it. This is in addition to other benefits that conventionally derive from the implementation of a national development plan including sustainable poverty reduction, employment generation, food security, wealth creation, and economic stability. As Nigerians vote, today, to elect a new president for the country, we pray that Allah gives us a president and national assembly members who would hit the ground launching and implementing the best of their ideas; not leaders who would hold onto same until their last days in office, amin.