Vision 2020 is on course – Dr Usman

Sir, you are the only Minister to have publicly declared his assets when you are appointed in 2007 and one may believe that was one of the reasons Mr. President has entrusted you as someone who would steer the planning process of the Transformation Agenda, since you assumed office, can you explain to our readers […]

Sir, you are the only Minister to have publicly declared his assets when you are appointed in 2007 and one may believe that was one of the reasons Mr. President has entrusted you as someone who would steer the planning process of the Transformation Agenda, since you assumed office, can you explain to our readers some of the challenges that you have faced in this ministry?

I think you have combined probably two questions in one. Let me start with the issue of public declaration of assets to set the records straight. At that time, I was the Minister of Finance, I and the Minister of State for Finance publicly declared our assets. To be honest with you, we were sort of taking a cue from the then President Yar’adua, who first publicly declared his assets. The second question you asked was about the trust that Mr President has on me. I don’t want to comment on that. It is the President that can say that.

But I must tell you that we have understanding with the President, he support me and because of that I got encouraged to work for the country and at the same time working for him as well. I think that level of support would certainly not be there if there was no high level of confidence. I appreciate the high level of confidence that Mr President have on me by reappointing me a number of time. I hope that the work I am doing has served to justify that level of confidence in me. The third question that you rolled up in one is the issue of challenges to the work that I am doing. My attitude to work is that if I identify a challenge I just go out and get it addressed instead of sitting down and crying either I don’t have enough money. My attitude is if there are challenges I just go out and get it done.

When I came on board as Minister of National Planning in 2009, the first challenge I found was that we have been talking about Vision 20:2020 since President Obasanjo’s time, but where is no document that you can show somebody and say this is the articulation of that Vision and it did not exist. I went to the President to get approval to mobilize Nigerians of the highest caliber to define that articulation and we did. In life there will always be challenges. Life is just about problem solving or meeting challenges and you find out that as you meet and solve challenges, that solution creates several others. At one point in the life of all of us we have the challenges passing the primary school examinations and once you pass that it open a whole vista of other challenges. You have to go to secondary school.

From three to four subjects you are faced with about eleven subjects including new set of subjects and passing WEAC is another challenge and once you passed WEAC it opens up another vista of challenge. In life you solve one set of challenges and it creates another set of others. For example, in the National Planning, we articulated the document for Vision 20:2020, then the challenge is how you go about making sure that it is implemented. The Vision 20:2020 by the time we did it was a 12 – year plan, we said lets break it into three, four years implementation clause and that was what led us to develop the National Implementation Plan for the Vision 20:2020, which we called the first NIP 2010 to 2013.

We realized that the Federal Government alone cannot implement the Vision, we had to involve all the key stakeholders. We have to involve the states to also develop their own Vision 20:2020 based on the national plan that we designed. We now said that even in the implementation we have to make states draw up their own Implementation Plan and we did that. The question is you have got a medium and long term implementation plan, how are you sure? You know, Nigerians are very skeptical… how are you sure this is going to be implemented? Then we said we need a framework that would measure the level of implementation.

As you are implementing, how well are we implementing? We have to now set up a whole new department in the National Planning, which is the Monitoring and Evaluation Department, because if you are not monitoring any plan that you have then you are not implementing the plan. It is only through monitoring and evaluation that you can say you are implementing according to plan and this is how far you have gone.

To do that effectively and efficiently, we have to get all the MDAs to develop what we called Key Performance Indicators so that even if you are measuring, you are measuring based on certain parameters and these Key Performance Indicators have to be aligned to actual outcome. We do a lot of activities in government but to what extend those activities improve on the life of average Nigerians. The measure we develop has to be on qualitative and quantitative terms and how they are impacting on the life of Nigerians.

We used to measure budget performance by how much you have spent, but is it actually adding value to average Nigerians? That may be relevant to a limited level. In the case of power for example, we have said that we have built several power stations but at the end of the day for an average Nigerian the only way you can say this is what you have done for him is to measure the number of hours of uninterrupted electricity supply that he is getting and a number of times that the national power collapses. We develop measures along those lines. If you take health, we say it is not the number of hospitals, equipments and nurses that you have got but what outcome are you achieving.

To what extend are we reducing maternal mortality rate, to what extend are we dealing with certain diseases that have been eradicated in certain countries but are here inflicting pains on people? We developed measures that are outcome oriented for the MDAs. This is what is now been finalized and the President is again giving us a great support. These KPI have been developed and we have draft performance agreement contracts now that would be signed between the ministers and the President, specifying these Key Performance Indicators. This would be done in the next few weeks.

The whole essence of the Vision 20:2020 was to make Nigeria one of the 20th economies by the year 2020. During President Yar’adua’s time the Seven Point Agenda was well pronounced, now we don’t hear that, what we hear is Transformation Agenda, what happened?

The Seven Point Agenda was to be from 2007 to 2011, while doing to Vision, what we did was that every possible plans that have been designed for this country, we took it and extricated critical issues, challenges and solutions that have been proffered and built them into it. When people ask me where is NEEDS II, where is Seven Point Agenda, They have all been swallowed by the Vision 20:2020 and advanced now by the Transformation Agenda. The Vision is a long term plan.

If you take the documents of countries that have Visions – this is now a global phenomena, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, South Africa – most countries that are developing today and were able to survive global economic crisis all have Vision documents and they are studiously following those Visions. We looked at the visions of those countries to guide us because for Nigeria we are doing it for the second time, we had Vision 2010 before. When you take a Vision document, usually it is a statement of intention. We intend to do this and that. It is not very detailed. The India document is slimmer than our own. Being a long term document, we now have to craft a medium term strategy and set up key policy statement that would guide us. The Transformation Agenda was actually designed as President Jonathan’s commitment, what key programme and project would be pursue by the administration from 2011 to 2015 in other to move us further towards achieving Vision 20:2020.

Looking at the Transformation Agenda as it is, one would tend to believe it has a roadmap, which stage of the implementation are we now?

The Transformation Agenda is from 2011 to 2015, basically we have done about a year now in the implementation and clearly there are quite a number of deliverables that have been achieved. We still have another three years ago.

Looking at the Vision 20:2020, perhaps the security challenges we are facing now may not have been captured. Do you fear that this may affect the attainment of the Vision?

The security challenges of the country were fairly well captured. By the time we are drawing up the Vision 20:2020 document, the security challenges then was the Niger Delta militants. Security issue was deeply captured. We had three main committees that looked at security. We had one group that was involved in covert security, we had another group that was involved in overt security and then we had another one that was more civilianize.

These three groups produced very detailed comprehensive submission about security. The issue of security is that we could not obviously put it in a public document. A lot of works are done but it is not in a public document. The second thing about security is that sometimes you have to take a longer term measure. When you look at the current security issues they look almost intractable but at one time the Niger Delta problem was like that and I used to say I don’t know if the problem would be solved in my life time but today it is been solved. For me as an economist, security is very critical.

It is one of the fundamental things we assume is there for a market system to be achieved, you assume security, you assume a good policing system to be there and you assume a good judicial system but if they are not there they affect the economy and the market. But my understanding is that as long as you have beginning to address the problem – as a Muslim I would say it is God’s intervention because something that look so intractable – when you looked at the Niger Delta problem and the critical intervention by President Yar’adua to signed the Amnesty document literally solved the problem and that region is relatively peaceful now. Now, President Goodluck is also working to solve the problem, there are things that you don’t disclosed in the public but I know President Goodluck is doing something.

It is one of the paradoxes of life that when there was a problem in Niger Delta it was a President from the North that solved it and now that the problem has shifted to the North, it looks like a President from the Niger Delta would solve that problem. On a long term basis I am not that concern but certainly on a short term basis there are challenges, there are impact in terms of economic activities in the north, especially in the states of the north that have been affected.

What advice would you give the governors in the states of the north where the activities of Boko Haram are high?

They say when you are pointing a figure at someone, four fingers are pointing at you. Let’s look at our own system. Lot of blames is from us, especially lack of leadership at all level. Leadership must rise at all level and sometimes at great risk. There is Ulamas, the traditional rulers, the political leaders and we elites from the north must rise and take the responsibility. At the end of the day we are probably the only ones who can solve these problems in a fundamental way. Government at the federal level would help, the international community would help but at the end of the day it is we. I am happy that I am seeing something happening.

The recent meeting between the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) with President was positive, the meeting of the Northern governors with President and Vice President was good. The fact that people are now beginning to come out and if they see something suspicious and say it, is good. This is a very good sign.

Somebody called me from Kano to say that something is happening. The ward heads those days knew everybody, every character – he knew criminals, ex-convicts – society just became too careless and nobody knew anybody. That level of leadership was very critical, that primary level of leadership lost their relevance. They are there but become merely ceremonial. Somebody called me from Kano and said something has started within Kano city. They are renumbering the houses and the Mai-unguwa system is been revived. We have to have some orders in our system. It is lack of order that make somebody to just do something and disappear.

Not long ago you are quoted to have said that the country needs N32 trillion to achieve the Vision 20:2020, where is the money going to be sourced from?

There are three primary sources or four. Clearly, federal, states and local governments. In this case what is happening is the restructuring of the budget to have more of capital votes which is investment than recurrent which is basically daily consumption, but this is not to say some of the recurrent is not a way of investment.

Another source is the private sector and we spend a lot of time working and trying to estimate. Government also has a key role to play on how much private sector come in by the kind of policies that we put in place. If government makes the right policy you would be surprise what comes out from the private sector. Get the right policy out and you would be surprised. Government would be made nearly like an orphan. Getting the policy framework right is very important. The third source is foreign direct investment. The Minister of Trade and Investment is trying in this direction.

Lastly, from a number of development finance institutions like the World Bank, African Development Bank, Islamic Development, the European Union, DFID. Many of them can bring about additional resources. The capital market can also provide long term funding.

Can you tell us more about some of the community programme you are doing in Kano to help the helpless?

Actually I am involved in two NGOs in Kano. One is the Kano Peace and Development Initiative which I am the chairman. Some of us saw the problems that are happening now a long time ago. In the early 1990s, when I was then working in a bank in Lagos, I went to Kano and go into the city where I come from originally. In my own side of the city at 5 pm everybody had gone in and luck themselves because of youth recalcitrant (Yan’daba).

At 5 pm the streets were deserted because of various attacks and soon after there were religious riots in Kano. We people of like minds came together and established the Kano Peace and Development Initiative and we did a number of things. One of the things we did was a peace forum where we invited virtually everybody.

We called the state government, we called Christian Association, we called Muslim Association, we called the Ibos, Yorubas and everybody and it was very successful. Only God knows if it was that conference that stopped religious crisis in the state. Since that time religious type of problems like killing of Christians and burning of churches stopped. We also did a number of programmes for the youths.

This Boko Haram issue did not start today. I used to say that if every educated person from Kano was going to do some of these things that we are trying to do we could have form a major force. The second NGO that I am involved in is called Gadauniya. This is more local and not state wide. This is focused more on my local government, the twelve wards in my local government. As at that time, two or three wards in my local government were the most notorious place for this Yan ‘daba and probably some of the most notorious in Kano and I said this cannot be. It is God that saved me. I could have been that way too.

Until primary school I grew up in that environment. It is only God’s divine providence that made me go to school and do well in school. These are the children of people that I grew up with and because there are no alternatives they get involved in all these. We started by providing a supplement for education. We were doing extra classes for people at primary level going to secondary and those going to the universities.

We are providing money for those that are going to apply and when they have applied to go to the university. Also, through the MDGs office we are able to establish a community health centre which the community is running now. It is one of the most successful hospitals that we have. We are doing computer centres and providing skills development and generally trying to organize the youths in the area. Since in the last ten years that we are doing it the level of Yan’daba has reduced significantly.

There was a time I was giving scholarship to every student that pass to go to secondary school. The first year I established that none qualified but now I have met some of them that have gone to the universities and graduated. One of them came to me and I asked about his grade he said third class and I said I cannot help you get a job, go back and get a better degree or do a master degree.

One of them came back to me and say thank you for that advice, I went back to school and now I have gotten myself a job without the help of anyone. This gives me a lot of satisfaction that I am contributing to the life of ordinary Nigerians. When I looked back it was a narrow escape. If God has helped me to escape that I should also help others.