From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
The Federal Government yesterday, gave reasons why the Economic Recovery Growth Plan (ERGP)could not meet its optimal objectives, attributing the failure to collective inability to address domestic growth constraints including political and policy changes in government.
Other factors listed by the Muhammadu Buhari administration include, less emphasis on inter-sector collaboration, weak link between plan and annual budget and absence of co-ordinating institutions for plan implementation.
Declaring open the 19th Joint Planning Board (JPB) meeting in Abuja, Minister of State for Finance, Budget and National Planning, Prince Clem Ikanade Agba, admitted that the government also had issues with poor business regulations, over-dependence on oil, bad governance and policy design failures.
To this end, he pleaded with state adminisitrations to avoid the lapses in the coming national plans.
“Apart from the ERGP that helped us to come out of economic recessions, the country did not grow more than 0.75 per cent and 3.19 per cent on average during 2017-2020 and 2010-2020 respectively. This could also be attributed to our collective inability to address domestic growth constraints. The plan implementation was also affected by political and policy changes, less emphasis on inter-sector collaboration, weak link between the plan and annual budget and absence of co-ordinating institutions for plan implementation. We had issues with poor business regulations, over-dependence on oil, bad governance and policy design failures. We do not want these to happen again.
“ We want to ensure that the basic needs of the states are well captured in the national plan as this is a major strategy to ensure that the government at the state and local levels are effectively mobilised for the implementation of the national plans. A quick assessment of the technical working groups (TWGs) reports show that the states are partially missing in action despite their participation at various TWGs. Thus, this meeting is aimed at harvesting additional perspectives of the states to ensure that the programmes and implementation of the sustainable development objectives of medium term national development plan (MTNDP) (2021-2025) at the federal level are in line with the development aspirations at the state level.