Dear Nigerians, I bring you good wishes from President Muhammadu
Buhari, GCFR, who as we all know is away from the country on medical
vacation.
Today marks the second anniversary of our assumption of office. We
must thank the Almighty God not only for preserving our lives to
celebrate this second anniversary, but for giving us hope, strength and
confidence as we faced the challenges of the past two years.
Our administration outlined three specific areas for our immediate
intervention on assumption of office: these were Security, Corruption
and the Economy.
In the Northeast of our country, the terrorist group Boko Haram
openly challenged the sovereignty and continued existence of the state,
killing, maiming,and abducting, causing the displacement of the largest
number of our citizens in recent history. Beyond the North East they
extended their mindless killings, as far away as Abuja, Kano And Kaduna.
But with new leadership and renewed confidence our gallant military
immediately began to put Boko Haram on the back foot. We have restored
broken-down relations with our neighbours, Chad, Cameroon and Niger –
allies without whom the war against terror would have been extremely
difficult to win.
We have re-organized and equipped our Armed Forces,
and inspired them to heroic feats; we have also revitalized the regional
Multinational Joint Task Force, by providing the required funding and
leadership.
The positive results are clear for all to see. In the last two years
close to one million displaced persons have returned home. 106 of our
daughters from Chibok have regained their freedom, after more than two
years in captivity, in addition to the thousands of other captives who
have since tasted freedom.
Schools, hospitals and businesses are springing back to life across
the Northeast, especially in Borno State, the epicentre of the crisis.
Farmers are returning to the farms from which they fled in the wake of
Boko Haram. Finally, our people are getting a chance to begin the urgent
task of rebuilding their lives.
Across the country, in the Niger Delta, and in parts of the North
Central region, we are engaging with local communities, to understand
their grievances, and to create solutions that respond to these
grievances adequately and enduringly.
President Buhari’s New Vision for the Niger Delta is a comprehensive
peace, security and development plan that will ensure that the people
benefit fully from the wealth of the region, and we have seen to it that
it is the product of deep and extensive consultations, and that it has
now moved from idea to execution.
Included in that New Vision is the
long-overdue environmental clean-up of the Niger Delta beginning with
Ogoni-land, which we launched last year.
More recent threats to security such as the herdsmen clashes with
farmers in many parts of the country sometimes leading to fatalities
and loss of livelihoods and property have also preoccupied our security
structures.
We are working with State governments, and tasking our
security agencies with designing effective strategies and interventions
that will bring this menace to an end. We are determined to ensure that
anyone who uses violence, or carries arms without legal authority is
apprehended and sanctioned.
In the fight against corruption, we have focused on bringing persons
accused of corruption to justice. We believe that the looting of public
resources that took place in the past few years has to be accounted
for.
Funds appropriated to build roads, railway lines, and power plants,
and to equip the military, that had been stolen or diverted into
private pockets, must be retrieved and the culprits brought to justice.
Many have said that the process is slow, and that is true, corruption
has fought back with tremendous resources and our system of
administration of justice has been quite slow.
But the good news for
justice is that our law does not recognize a time bar for the
prosecution of corruption and other crimes, and we will not relent in
our efforts to apprehend and bring corruption suspects to justice.
We
are also re-equipping our prosecution teams, and part of the expected
judicial reforms is to dedicate some specific courts to the trial of
corruption cases.
We are also institutionalizing safeguards and deterrents. We have
expanded the coverage of the Treasury Single Account (TSA). We have
introduced more efficient accounting and budgeting systems across the
Federal Government. We have also launched an extremely successful
Whistleblower Policy.
The Efficiency Unit of the Federal Ministry of Finance has succeeded
in plugging leakages amounting to billions of naira, over the last two
years. We have ended expensive and much-abused fertilizer and petrol
subsidy regimes.
We have taken very seriously our promise to save and invest for the
future, even against the backdrop of our revenue challenges, and we have
in the last two years added US$500m to our Sovereign Wealth Fund and
US$87m to the Excess Crude Account.
This is the very opposite of the
situation before now, when rising oil prices failed to translate to
rising levels of savings and investment.
Admittedly, the economy has proven to be the biggest challenge of
all. Let me first express just how concerned we have been, since this
administration took office, about the impact of the economic
difficulties on our citizens.
Through no fault of theirs, some companies shut down their
operations, others downsized; people lost jobs, had to endure rising
food prices.
In some States civil servants worked months on end without
the guarantee of a salary, even as rents and school fees and other
expenses continued to show up like clockwork.
We have been extremely mindful of the many sacrifices that you have
had to make over the last few years.
And for this reason this
administration’s work on the economic front has been targeted at a
combination of short-term interventions to cushion the pain, as well as
medium to long term efforts aimed at rebuilding an economy that is no
longer helplessly dependent on the price of crude oil.
Those short-term interventions include putting together a series of
bailout packages for our State Governments, to enable them bridge their
salary shortfalls – an issue the President has consistently expressed
his concerns about.
We also began the hard work of laying out a
framework for our Social Intervention Programme, the most ambitious in
the history of the country.
One of the first tasks of the Cabinet and the Economic Management
Team was to put together a Strategic Implementation Plan for the 2016
budget, targeting initiatives that would create speedy yet lasting
impact on the lives of Nigerians.
Indeed, much of 2016 was spent clearing the mess we inherited and
putting the building blocks together for the future of our dreams;
laying a solid foundation for the kind of future that you deserve as
citizens of Nigeria.
In his Budget Presentation Speech to the National Assembly last
December, President Buhari outlined our Economic Agenda in detail, and
assured that 2017 -would be the year in which you would begin to see
tangible benefits of all the planning and preparation work. It is my
pleasure to note that in the five months since he delivered that speech,
we have seen tremendous progress, as promised.
Take the example of our Social Investment Programme, which kicked off
at the end of 2016. Its Home Grown School Feeding component is now
feeding more than 1 million primary school children across seven states
and would be feeding three million by the end of the year. N-Power,
another component has engaged 200,000 unemployed graduates – none of
whom needed any ‘connections’ to be selected. Beneficiaries are already
telling the stories of how these initiatives have given them a fresh
start in their lives.
Micro credit to a million artisans, traders and market men and women
has begun. While conditional cash transfers to eventually reach a
million of the poorest and most vulnerable households has also begun.
Road and power projects are ongoing in every part of the country. In
rail, we are making progress with our plans to attract hundreds of
millions of dollars in investment to upgrade the existing 3,500km
narrow-gauge network.
We have also in 2017 flagged-off construction work
on the Lagos-Ibadan leg of our standard-gauge network, and are close to
completing the first phase of Abuja’s Mass Transit Rail System.
In that Budget speech in December, the President announced the
take-off of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative.
Today, five months
on, that Initiative – the product of an unprecedented bilateral
cooperation with the Government of Morocco – has resulted in the
revitalisation of 11 blending plants across the country, the creation of
50,000 direct and indirect jobs so far, and in the production of
300,000 metric tonnes of NPK fertilizer, which is being sold to farmers
at prices significantly lower than what they paid last year.
By the end
of 2017, that Fertilizer Initiative would have led to foreign exchange
savings of US$200 million; and subsidy savings of 60 billion naira.
The Initiative is building on the solid gains of the Anchor Borrowers
Programme, launched in 2015 to support our rice and wheat farmers, as
part of our move towards guaranteeing food security for Nigeria.
All of this is evidence that we are taking very seriously our
ambition of agricultural self-sufficiency. I am delighted to note that
since 2015 our imports of rice have dropped by 90 percent, while
domestic production has almost tripled. Our goal is to produce enough
rice to meet local demand by 2019.
In April, the President launched our
Economic Recovery and Growth Plan which built on the foundations laid
by the Strategic implementation Plan of 2016. The plan has set forth a
clear vision for the economic development of Nigeria. I will come back
to this point presently.
Another highlight of the President’s Budget Speech was our work
around the Ease of Doing Business reforms. As promised we have since
followed up with implementation and execution.
I am pleased to note that
we are now seeing verifiable progress across several areas, ranging
from new Visa on Arrival scheme, to reforms at our ports and regulatory
agencies.
The President also promised that 2017 would see the rollout of
Executive Orders to facilitate government approvals, support procurement
of locally made goods, and improve fiscal responsibility. We have kept
that promise.
This month we issued three Executive Orders to make it
easier for citizens to get the permits and licenses they require for
their businesses, to mandate Government agencies to spend more of their
budgets on locally produced goods, and to promote budget transparency
and efficiency.
The overarching idea is to make Government Agencies and
Government budgets work more efficiently for the people.
The impact of our Ease of Doing Business work is gradually being felt
by businesses small and large; its successful take-off has allowed us
to follow up with the MSME Clinics -our Small Business support
programme, which has taken us so far to Aba, Sokoto, Jos, Katsina, and
we expect to be in all other states in due course.
Let me note, at this point, that several of our Initiatives are
targeted at our young people, who make up most of our population.
From
N-Power, to the Technology Hubs being developed nationwide, to
innovation competitions such as the Aso Villa Demo Day, and our various
MSME support schemes, we will do everything to nurture the immense
innovative and entrepreneurial potential of our young people. We are a
nation of young people, and we will ensure that our policies and
programmes reflect this.
One of the highlights of our Power Sector Recovery Programme, which
we launched in March, is a N701 billion Naira Payment Assurance Scheme
that will resolve the financing bottlenecks that have until now
constrained the operations of our gas suppliers and generation
companies. Let me assure that you will soon begin to see the positive
impact of these steps.
Our Solid Minerals Development Fund has also now taken off, in line
with our commitment to developing the sector.
Because of our unerring
focus on Solid Minerals development over the last two years, the sector
has, alongside Agriculture, seen impressive levels of growth – in spite
of the recession.
On the whole, just as the President promised in the Budget Speech,
these early months of 2017 have seen the flowering of the early fruit of
all the hard work of our first eighteen months.
We opened the year with an overwhelmingly successful Eurobond Offer –
evidence of continuing investor interest in Nigeria.
We have also
launched the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) 2017-2020, to
build on the gains of last year’s Strategic Implementation Plan.
And the
implementation of our 2017 Budget, which will soon be signed into law,
will bring added impetus to our ongoing economic recovery.
In the 2016
Budget we spent 1.2 Trillion Naira on infrastructure projects, another
milestone in the history of this country. Our 2017 Budget will double
that investment.
That budget also provides for substantial investment to implement the
rollout of Industrial Parks and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), as well
as our Social Housing Programme.
The Industrial Parks and Economic Zones
will fulfill our ambition of making Nigeria a manufacturing hub, while
the Family Home Fund of our Social Housing Programme will provide
inexpensive mortgages for low-income individuals and families across the
country.
These plans offer yet more evidence that we are ramping up the pace
of work; the work of fulfilling all that we promised. In the next two
years we will build on the successes of the last two. We have
demonstrated a willingness to learn from our mistakes and to improve on
our successes.
The critical points that we must address fully in the
next two years are : Agriculture and food security, Energy, (power and
Petroleum,)
Industrialization and Transport infrastructure.
Every step
of the way we will be working with the private sector, giving them the
necessary incentives and creating an environment to invest and do
business.
Our vision is for a country that grows what it eats and produces what
it consumes. It is for a country that no longer has to import petroleum
products, and develops a lucrative petrochemical industry.
Very
importantly it is for a country whose fortunes are no longer tied to the
price of a barrel of crude, but instead to the boundless talent and
energy of its people, young and old, male and female as they invest in
diverse areas of the economy.
And that vision is also for a country where the wealth of the many
will no longer be stolen by or reserved for a few; and where the
impunity of corruption – whether in the public or private sectors – will
no longer be standard operating practice; a land rid of bandits and
terrorists.
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