NAN-HE-16
Plan
By Kingsley Okoye
Abuja, Mar. 3,2017(NAN)The African Capacity Building Foundation Fund,(ACBF) has identified lack of commitment, inadequate capacity of government institutions to implement development plans as largely responsible for economic challenges in the African region.
The Executive Secretary of ACBF, Prof. Emmanuel Nnadozie, said this in an interview with the News Agency Of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Friday.
Nnadozie, an economist and a development expert, said the greatest challenge facing Nigeria at this time was the recession it found its self.
He said there was no reason Nigeria should be in recession, given the robust nature of its development plans and visions over the years.
He, however, said that the inability to fully implement the plans were part of the reasons for the current economic crunch in the country.
Nnadozie said it was cheering that the government was putting together an economic recovery and growth programme to get the country out of the recession .
According to him, Nigeria should be growing at double digit at this point in time.
“It should not be in negative growth rate; this country should be doing at least 10 to 13 per cent growth rate,” he said.
He said it was important that Nigeria resorted to long term measures of development.
“But we should not confuse this short term expansionary policy to address recession with the long term strategy for developing the country.
“ I have emphasised this long enough to say that this country has always had good plans and good strategies, weather it is vision 2020 or the national development strategies.
“Nigeria has always had good plans; It always had plans to diversify the economy, but the issue has always been to what extent has this nice strategic plans be implemented.”
Nnadozie said that Nigeria made the mistake that many countries made by listening much to outsiders who it thought knew better than Nigerians.
This, he said, resulted in successive governments abandoning well articulated policy documents designed to promote economic development and prosperity in the country.
“When you make a plan as individual and things don’t work as an individual, would you then throw away the plan.
“But what did we do on the continent, we throw away the plans made because people told us that the plan will not work.
“ The Asians never threw away their plans; from China to Malaysia, to Indonesia, to South Korea, none of them stops planning, even though they were advised to do the same thing that Africans were advised to do.
“ They continued with their development plans, but perfected it, continued to have leadership that enforced and make sure that it was implemented and look at where they are today.“
According to him, whatever plan the managers of the nation’s economy will make to salvage the economy will not be different from the well formulated plans of the past.
Nnadozie said it was important that managers of the economy be disciplined and consistent in the process of implementing whatever economic plans designed to salvage the economy.
“ We need to have some where we are aiming to go and decide how best to get there.
“In vision 2020, we had the strategies, but you can see that we have that and kept it aside and everybody is just doing something different; there is no discipline to follow the strategy put in place.
According to him, the issue of non implementation of the various plans is not the challenge of money but the challenge of capacity.
“The constraint is capacity; three types of capacity, one is the soft capacity, that is the leadership capacity, the mind set, the issues of values; the second one is the human capacity, then the critical skills that are needed.
He said it was important that Nigerians in government and leadership positions developed the right capacity to drive development in the country.
“We have thousands of educated Nigerians all over the world; how can they shine in other places and they don’t perform here in Nigeria.
“It is not that it does not have the critical skills but some time, they are not allowed to contribute here.”
He also said it was also important to strengthen the capacity of various institutions of government involved in implementing economic and development policies in the country. (NAN)
KC/IA
(Edited by Idris Abdulrahman)