President Muhammadu Buhari on December 22, 2021 launched Nigeria’s National Development Plan (NDP) 2021-2025, a medium-term development plan to succeed the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP 2017-2020). Like its ancestors, the Plan has a laudable objective. It points to the type of Nigeria that we all want and encourages the use of science, technology, and innovation to drive growth.
The Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Dr Zainab Ahmed, who anchored the unveiling of the Plan, revealed at the event that, “The current difficulties are the result of many years of ineffective policies, fiscal leakages, and global economic phenomena. This administration is taking the necessary steps to fundamentally alter the structure of the economy and how government business is conducted in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness.”
However, the said objective of the NDP 2021-2025 is not fundamentally different from previous development plans, including the ERPG 2017-2020 it is said to succeed, which achieved little result and witnessed Nigeria’s worst socio-economic condition.
The ERGP, launched in April 2017, served as an umbrella framework that incorporated 60 national development strategies; 12 of these strategies including infrastructure, industrial and power sector development were identified as priorities. The ERGP, which achieved little result, had set the ambitious target of 7 percent real GDP growth by 2020.
Again, the ERGP emerged in the seventh year of Vision 20:2020 launched in September 2009. The Nigeria Vision 20:2020 (NV20:2020) was the country’s long term development goal designed to propel the country to the league of the top 20 economies of the world by 2020. Attainment of the Vision would enable the country to achieve a high standard of living for its citizens, the government then said.
Realising its inability to meet Vision 20:2020 goals, several years after the country embarked on an ambitious agenda to be among the top 20 economies, in terms of GDP size, President Muhammadu Buhari on September 9, 2020 in Abuja inaugurated the National Steering Committee to oversee and actualise Nigeria Agenda 2050 and Medium-Term National Development Plan (MTNDP). The MTNDP was aimed at lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty.
Speaking at the inauguration, President Buhari said: “The main objectives of MTNDP considered as successor plan, include to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within the next 10 years, particularly given the World Bank’s projection that Nigeria will become the world’s third most populous country by 2050 with over 400 million people.’’
Long before this time, Nigeria had had Vision 2010 created by the late Gen. Sani Abacha-led government in November 1996. The broad vision was that by 2010, Nigeria would have been transformed into “a united, industrious, caring and God-fearing democratic society, committed to making the basic needs of life affordable for everyone, and creating Africa’s leading economy”.
Amid these development plans and vision strategies, Nigeria slipped into the trench of the world’s poverty capital and has remained there till date with 93.9 million of its population living below the poverty line. At the end of May 2018, Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million, according to the Brookings Institution’s report.
Today, virtually every development index is against Nigeria. Unemployment rate is at an all-time high of 33.1 percent from 9 percent in 2015 when the Buhari-led government was inaugurated. The country’s real GDP value dropped from $486.8 billion in 2015 to $440 billion in the third quarter of 2021. The growth rate dipped from 6 percent to 4.03 percent as of 2021 after suffering two recessions in 2016 and 2020.
Similarly, Nigerians are three times more miserable than five years ago from 14.75 percent to 50.48 percent, while inflation rate has remained at double digit point –15.63 percent in December 2021 as against 9.01 percent in 2015. The official exchange rate climbed from N197/US$1 in 2015 to N416 currently.
Nigeria has the largest out-of-school children in the world at 13.2 million. Amid worsening insecurity, Nigeria is ranked the third most terrorised country in the world after Afghanistan and Iraq, while a global corruption index report shows that the country climbed from 180 in 2015 to its current 145 position.
This ugly picture does not show that the country has had a successful development plan or that the vision strategies had any impact on her citizens. The major reason lies in poor leadership at all levels of our national life. Nigeria has been badly governed and its affairs unpatriotically managed. It is preposterous to expect an effective development in an environment that operates contrary to the philosophies of such plans.
The Federal Government should return to the spirit and strategies, which produced the past national development plans that laid a solid foundation for our economic growth. These include the first, second, third and fourth National Development Plans. (1962-68, 1970-74, 1975-80 and 1981-85, respectively). Emphasis was placed on key sectors, such as agriculture, manufacturing, education and manpower development, and infrastructural facilities. This led to a quantum leap in our economic advancement.
The government should establish an agency in the Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning with the mandate to monitor the strict implementation of the NDP 2021-2025. Annual budgets should be tailored toward the objectives and goals of the Plan. There must be attitudinal change in our governance culture, otherwise the NDP 2021-2020 will end up another exercise in strategic deception.
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