The federal government is crafting a 10-year National Development Plan, the Minister of State, Budget and National Planning, Prince Clem Agba has revealed. He spoke at a meeting with the Japanese Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Nigeria, Yutaka Kikuta, in Abuja, yesterday, according to Victoria Agba-Attah, the Director of Information in the Ministry of Budget and National Planning, in a statement.
Prince Agba disclosed that the National Development Plan would be broken down into two 5-year medium-term plans, from which the annual budgets would be drawn. He expressed the Government’s readiness to make the process of the National development plan very inclusive. The minister claimed that the federal government had made tremendous progress in its effort at repositioning the nation’s economy and working to sustain the January-December Budget cycle.
“We want to sustain what happened last year in terms of early budget passage, we will continue to work with the National Assembly to repeat the feat. If we fail to repeat it, it means that what happened was just a chance or a fluke but if we do it means that we have a process and a plan that we intend to build on” the Minister said.
The Minister added that the return of the Budget cycle to January was deliberate and in line with the current administration’ economic recovery plan, which is culminating in the development of another National Development Plan, intended to succeed the ERGP.
Prince Clem Agba commended the Government of Japan for the development assistance and the cordial relationship that has existed between the two countries in the past 60 years and promised to do everything in his power to ensure that the plans were realized.
The Ambassador said the meeting was to discuss ways of crystallizing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s promise of assisting to strengthen the National Center for Disease Control (NCDC) with a grant of 2billion Japenese Yen, as well as support to the National Defence College.
“We support President Buhari’s second term because we deeply believe in his priority areas and we feel the Federal Government is on the right track”. Yutaka Said.