TheCable

The federal government has announced to work on a 20-year economic development plan for the country to succeed the Vision 2020.

Speaking on Thursday at the BusinessDay Investment and Capital Markets conference in Abuja, Zainab Ahmed, the minister of finance, budget and national planning, said there will also be a five-year plan to succeed the economic and recovery growth plan (ERGP).

Both economic plans will expire in 2020.

“Having recognized that Nigeria’s past failure to plan and execute sustainable diversified and inclusive growth and development which led to a recession, precipitated by external shocks like the crude oil price crash, the government in its plan is looking at developing a new long term plan,” she said.

“The ERGP that we are currently implementing expires next year, 2020, also the vision 2020 expires in 2020. So in this third quarter of 2019, we will kick start a process of a new long term development plan which could be 20 years or 30 years.

“An important next step will be to transition our 2017-2020 economic recovery and growth plan to a successive long-term vision 2040 plan. To this end, I am currently working with the minister of state budget and national planning to prepare a medium-term economic growth acceleration plan for 2021-2024 as a successor to the ERGP.”

The minister explained that the government would still continue executing the ERGP to “make sure that we have developed an investment structure to drive the non-oil revenue sector to move away from the oil economy”.

On infrastructure funding, Ahmed said the process of raising funding using naira-denominated bonds called Jollof bonds will begin in 2020.

“To this end, during the recently concluded 2019 annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank, we met with UK authorities to advance discussions regarding their commitment to support our infrastructure financing through the possible issuance of Jollof bonds,” she explained.

“Already, a working group is being set up to work on Naira denominated, internationally traded bonds. The Central Bank of Nigeria is leading this effort. We will explore all the options on this at the next UK Investment Summit in January 2020.”

Nigeria has had a number of development plans in the past including Vision 2010, seven-point agenda introduced by the Umar Musa Yar’Adua-led administration; transformation agenda introduced
by Goodluck Jonathan-led administration, structural adjustment program (SAP) of the 1980s to mention a few.