…Says Plan short of specifics
A financial expert, Mr. Johnson has faulted the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) recently launched by President Muhammadu Buhari at Abuja describing it as lacking in details as how it will be achieved.
Chukwu who made this known in an interview with our correspondent in Lagos said that although the plan was a vision that looks very appealing which could serve ordinarily as a galvanizing or modulating force, however, it was low on specifics.
He submitted that the Minister of National Planning would develop the sub plans that would fit into the overall plan so as to make the plan implementable adding that because of lack of details, the plan would be difficult for the private sector to step in and implement.
“Take for instance, the government did mention it is going to create 15 million jobs, the plan was not specific on which sectors will generate what number of jobs. The plan has made provision that we are going to reduce our import of the petroleum products, that we are going to refine 60% of what we consume by 2018 and be a net exporter of refined products 2020 but the plan was short of how we are going to do that. Are we going to change the current fiscal regime in the downstream sector and eliminate subsidy so that local companies can build refineries or are we going to turn around the existing refineries so that we can produce 60% by 2018? And 2018 is just next year and then how do we want to achieve that net exporter position by 2020?
“So, you have a number of idealistic plan specified in that document that they need to give us a detailed breakdown so that we know how the plan will be achieved. Another classical example is that the plan made provision that we are going to increase our power production to 10, 000 megawatts by 2020, how do we plan to do that? Is there any ongoing works to build more power plants or have we incentivize power generation companies so that they can build more power plants because the reality is that we don’t have such capacity to operate 10, 000 megawatts assuming all the power plants we have in the country have become operational and are producing at 100%. So, you need to be clear how that could happen.
“Then, what are we doing with evacuation capacity in the national transmission grid? The national transmission grid today cannot roll out 6, 000 megawatts. Are we strengthening it? We have toyed with the super grids that we have a 760 kilowatts transmission capacity but that seems to be in the cooler. Are we expanding the current 330 KVA transmission grids and the 131 KVA transmission grids? We need to have in that plan say this is how we are going to achieve that plan. . So, the overall vision is idealistic, the details is where the devil lies and like I may tell you, the devil is in the details”, he stated.
While stating that the need right now was not for an enlightenment campaign but a detail account of how government planned to achieve the plan as the plan according to him was on how to achieve it.
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