The Federal Government is set to establish a taskforce on the implementation of key objectives of its recently launched Economic Growth and Recovery Plan EGRP.
Minister of Budget and National Planning, Sen. Udo Udoma, who disclosed this at an ERGP Implementation stakeholders’ dialogue session in Abuja yesterday, said: “Already, the ministry has commenced the process of establishing a Delivery Unit, as well as Implementation Units, to facilitate the effective implementation of the plan.
‘’This is to be complemented with the establishment of special task forces on the key execution areas of the plan.”
He said just as the plan was developed through an extensive consultative process to ensure collective ownership, the dialogue session was part of the process set out by the Ministry to consult and harvest valuable inputs in order to further fine-tune the approach for enriching the ERGP Implementation Roadmap.
Media Adviser to the minister, James Akpandem, quoted the minister in a statement as saying that faithful implementation of the ERGP was one of the cardinal focus of government, having realized that lack of diligent implementation was largely responsible for the failure of previous plans.
“As a government, we believe that we can only succeed in transforming Nigeria if we work closely with stakeholders.
‘’This is the first of many consultative processes we will be holding on plan implementation, as well as to get feedback from stakeholders,’’ he said.
The stakeholders were informed of the commencement of the process of developing a detailed implementation road-map.
“This will lay out the roadmap for a step by step delivery of each of the strategies. Each strategy will be further broken down into component activities, sub-activities and actions. Each action will be supported by clearly assigned responsibilities, which will be sequenced against clear milestones and timelines for ease of monitoring,’’ he said.
The Minister stressed that the benefits of the ERGP could not be fully appreciated unless its provisions were effectively and faithfully implemented.
While admitting that the country’s plan implementation track record had not been very good, he pointed out that there was a conscious effort to ensure that the ERGP didn’t go the way of previous plans. Section 7 of the plan is specifically dedicated to implementation.
The section says that focus must be on priorities; there must be clear accountability; target must be set and detailed action plans developed; resources must be mobilized and allocated to the priorities; an enabling policy and regulatory environment must be created; and delivery units must be set up to monitor and drive progress.