FG seeks N’Assembly support for economic recovery plan

The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udo Udoma, on Tuesday said the support of the National Assembly was vital to the successfully implementation of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan.

The ERGP, which was unveiled last week, is the government’s strategy that envisages that by 2020, Nigeria would have made significant progress towards achieving structural change with a more diversified and inclusive economy.

Overall, the plan is expected to deliver on five key broad outcomes, which are a stable macroeconomic environment; agricultural transformation and food security; sufficiency in energy (power and petroleum products); improved transportation infrastructure; and industrialisation focusing on Small and Medium-scale Enterprises.

Speaking when members of the House of Representatives Tactical Committee on Recession visited him on Tuesday, the minister said the document had a dual purpose of getting the economy out of recession and putting the country on the path of sustainable and inclusive growth.

The National Assembly, he said, had a very important role to play in the successful implementation of the recovery plan, because the achievement of the broad objectives would largely depend on the execution of projects contained in the budgets of 2017 to 2020.

A statement from the minister’s Media Adviser, Mr. Akpandem James, quoted him to have said, “This plan puts together all the things that we have been doing, including the strategies we have already developed and launched, which is why you are already seeing progress in agriculture and other areas.

“We have exited cash calls in our joint venture relationships in the oil sector, which decision was announced last year; it is all part of the plan so that funding of the joint ventures will no longer be a constraint, which is why in the plan we are also targeting 2.5 million barrels per day production of crude oil by 2020.”

Explaining why focus is still on crude oil even when the government is laying emphasis on diversification into the non-oil sector, the minister said the economy would continue to rely on oil in the short-term.

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