President Muhammadu Buhari will today lead a live presidential policy dialogue, focusing mainly on tracking corruption, insecurity and institutionalising Accountability at the 21st series of the Nigerian Economic Summit (NES#21) which begins in Abuja to discuss those critical tough choices open for the country, especially in the face low oil revenues.
Organisers of the event say the Dialogue will focus on the strategic elements required to make Nigeria globally competitive, and coming at a time Nigeria fell seven places to 127th position (out of 144 countries) on the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, due largely to weakened public finances, weak institutions, corruption, dire security situation, weak infrastructure, as well as high youth unemployment.
Bassey Akpanyung, Secretary, National Planning Commission told BusinessDay that the theme of the Summit, “Tough Choices: Achieving Competitiveness, Inclusive Growth and Sustainability” aligns with President Buhari’s change agenda and the Medium Term Successor Strategic Plan, 2016-2020 which focuses on addressing unemployment, fighting corruption insecurity, among others.
Akpanyung argued that this is so, considering the fact that Nigeria continues to trend downward on measures of relative competitiveness and moreso, since experience has shown that issues on unemployment, insecurity and other critical economic challenges that Nigeria faces cannot be tackled effectively without addressing those issues that have kept the country low on the index.
“There are tough choices to be made now as a country, especially at this point because so many things are not moving in the direction that they should. Let’s start from the budgeting process, we have been having an incremental kind of budgeting regime in the past, but it has not saved us. A choice has to be made whether to continue in that line, or we should try and work on some other strategies.”
He said the thinking of government is that this is now the time to discontinue incremental budgeting but then move to zero – based budgeting which has its own advantages and which it is thought, could make a lot of difference.
He explained that this is critical first of all because rather than just keep putting money on top of projects, questions must now be asked as to whether “these projects that we are carrying will be able to help us realise policy thrust of government. Whether they are being costed effectively to ensure that there is value for money when resources are committed to them, and also whether the outcomes and outputs at the end, are those that would help government reach Nigerians at the level that they are.
“Again, government revenues are going down, projections are that they are not going to improve substantially in the near future, so we have make a choice, what do we do? We have to diversify. Perhaps in times past, we have been paying lip service to diversification, the realities on ground mean that we have to be and do what we need to do to be able to pull this through,” Akpanyung added.
He said that their expectations are that the summit will come up with measurable outcomes on how best to achieve competitiveness and inclusive growth in a sustainable manner.
“This will also be crucial in defining the agenda that will help in making Nigeria’s socio-economic environment globally competitive,” he stated.
He said that the Summit has been designed to elicit deeper dialogue on how best to make tough choices, considering the present global economic realities which government needs to deal with.
“In particular, the continuous decline in oil prices, resulting in reduction in government revenues, insurgency in some parts of the country and rising unemployment rate, especially among the youths, have made it imperative for the government to to start thinking outside the box on a post oil economy,” the Secretary added.
The Nigerian Economic Summit, an annual dialogue event jointly convened by the National Planning Commission, representing the public sector and the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), representing the private sector is the largest annual economic forum for policy making in the Africa’s largest economy.
The yearly Summit maximizes the rare opportunity of gathering the highest level of public sector officials and that of the private sector to dialogue on contemporary issues of national development.
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