Agba: FG to Inaugurate New Economic Devt Plan’s Steering Committee in March

The Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Mr. Clem Agba, has disclosed that the steering committee for the new national economic development plan would be inaugurated latest by first week of next month.

This is coming as Agba also declared that the problem confronting Nigeria over the years was not caused by lack of good leadership but by the followership, who vote wrong people into power.

The minister made the disclosure yesterday during his familiarisation tour of the facilities of the Centre for Management Development (CMD) located at Ketu, Lagos State.

The new economic plan when drafted, passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the President, would replace the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERPG) which came to an end in December last year.

He said a lot of work on the plan had been going on since November last year, adding that for the steering committee, the federal government wanted to ensure that all segments of the country were duly represented.

Agba said: “We have actually gone very far and we have identified those people but we need to reach out and get acceptance. So I do believe latest by first week of March we should be inaugurating them.

“But already some of the technical committee members are working. So it is not as if there is no work going on; a lot of work started sometime in November last year, and then the real technical work is done at the technical working group.

“The central working group is already working because most of them are in government. But at the steering committee level, we want it to be truly national. So we are reaching out. You know we want to be able to capture all the diversities, most of the diversities that we have in the country.

“We don’t want it to be a federal government plan, rather we want it to be a federation plan, and if it is a federation, it means that you have there the sub-nationals, the private sector, the Civil Society organisations, the religious groups, the physically-challenged, the women.

“So we are trying to identify who these representatives should be, so that as the technical committee works, and the central working group brings everything together, there is a team that is truly national before we can go to the Federal Executive Council, the National Economic Council and all of that.”

The minister also said that an evaluation study of the short-term plans of the ERGP was ongoing, pointing out that such study was necessary as the results would be needed as a guide in the formulation of the new plan.