This is the first of a concluding two-part article in a series I have written in this column on the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, beginning with the article titled, “The economic reform programme of President Tinubu: The 8-Point Agenda,” published on January 30, 2024. As an economist, I have adopted a clinical—dispassionate, focused, and professional—approach to the Renewed Hope Agenda because the fortunes of the Nigerian economy in President Tinubu’s first four-year term might as well just depend on it. The article of December 9, 2024, titled “The renewed hope agenda, national development planning, and agenda 2063,” made a case for the Renewed Hope Agenda to be formalised into a development plan using the framework of the extant National Development Plan (2021-2025) and Agenda 2063. Last week’s article titled, “The benefits of fusing the Renewed Hope Agenda, national development planning, and Agenda 2063,” listed the benefits of formalising the Renewed Hope Agenda and merging it with existing developing planning frameworks.
Read also: The benefits of fusing the Renewed Hope Agenda, national development planning and Agenda 2063
This article suggests key performance indicators (KPIs) for the Renewed Hope Agenda. The last few articles canvassed the point of view that the Renewed Hope Agenda can best be achieved within the framework of a broader development plan. Even then, at the end of His first four-year term in office, the President should be able to point out the extent to which each of the eight component points of the Renewed Hope Agenda has been achieved. This is the basis for seeking to attach KPIs to each of the eight points. We will be guided by international benchmarks where they exist and suggest reasonable performance indicators where they do not exist.
“Even then, at the end of His first four-year term in office, the President should be able to point out the extent to which each of the eight component points of the Renewed Hope Agenda has been achieved.”
For easy reference, listed below are the eight points of the Renewed Hope Agenda:
Reform the economy to deliver sustained, inclusive growth.
Strengthen national security for peace and prosperity.
Boost agriculture to achieve food security.
Unlock energy and national resources for sustainable development.
Enhance infrastructure and transportation as enablers of growth.
Focus on education, health, and social investment as essential pillars of development.
Accelerate diversification through industrialisation, digitalisation, creative arts, manufacturing, & innovation.
Improve governance for effective service delivery.
The first point, “Reform the economy to deliver sustained inclusive growth,” has two parts: “reform the economy” and “deliver sustained inclusive growth.” The KPIs here include 1) full deregulation of all markets to allow for price discovery; 2) full privatisation of all government-owned enterprises; 3) tax reforms to expand Nigeria’s tax base and ensure the mobilisation of sufficient domestic resources for national development. The Tinubu Administration has not developed an elaborate economic reform blueprint, but the specific economic reform programs they have initiated so far are far-reaching and fundamental. These include liberalisation of the foreign exchange markets/elimination of multiple exchange rates; the full deregulation of the refined petroleum products market; measures taken to achieve cost-reflective prices in the electricity market, which is still work in progress; increase in the price of natural gas for power generation in April 2024 to incentivise more investment inflows and increased national gas production; two executive orders aimed at improving the ease of doing business in the upstream oil and gas sector and the achievement of five asset sales through divesting international oil companies (IOCs) and two final investment decisions (FIDs); and the four tax reform bills before the National Assembly. Furthermore, the government has phased out Ways and Means, or the printing of the naira for the local currency component of its budget deficits. The Central Bank of Nigeria also removed the ban on the importation of 43 items not eligible for foreign exchange. However, the main gap in the administration’s economic reform program is privatisation. The Tinubu Administration needs to unequivocally make privatisation a major plank of its economic reform program. The government has no business running enterprises that are better owned and managed by private investors. A case in point is the power sector, where the government owns assets in the entire electricity supply value chain.
Read also: The Renewed Hope Agenda, national development planning and Agenda 2063
Point no. 2, “Strengthen national security for peace and prosperity,” is a military and political objective that has far-reaching economic implications, with kinetic and non-kinetic dimensions. The objective can best be achieved through multi-stakeholder commitments with an emphasis on non-kinetic engagements. The KPIs here are reduction in incidents of terrorism and insurgency and kidnapping for ransom, which has become a multi-trillion naira enterprise, and reduction to the barest minimum of attacks on farmers and farmlands.
Point no. 3, “Boost agriculture to achieve food security,” is just as strategic to turning the economy around as reform in other key sectors of the economy. With a contribution of nearly 30 percent to Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employment of about 70 percent of the labour force, agriculture is the big elephant in the room. The key performance indicators here are “boost agriculture,” which is measurable by the percentage of the annual budget allocated to the agricultural sector, and “achieve food security,” which is measurable by the percentage growth of the agricultural sector and the impact on food prices. The benchmark for the financing of the agriculture sector, as recommended by the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), is 10 percent of the annual budget. Our agricultural sector has the potential to grow by 10 percent per annum, but we should be targeting a minimum of 5 percent average growth per annum, instead of the anaemic 1.14 percent growth in the third quarter (Q3) 2024.
Boosting agriculture to achieve food security cannot be done by the federal government alone but through collaborative efforts by the three tiers of government, with other key stakeholders, including farmers and farmers associations, private investors, community leaders in agriculture production zones, and the security agencies.
Mr Igbinoba is Team Lead/CEO at ProServe Options Consulting, Lagos
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
