Dear Nigerians, I bring you good
wishes from President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR, who as we all know is away from
the country on medical vacation.
Today marks the second
anniversary of our assumption of office. We must thank the Almighty God not
only for preserving our lives to celebrate this second anniversary, but for
giving us hope, strength and confidence as we faced the challenges of the past
two years.
Our administration outlined three
specific areas for our immediate intervention on assumption of office: these
were Security, Corruption and the Economy.
In the Northeast of our country,
the terrorist group Boko Haram openly challenged the sovereignty and continued
existence of the state, killing, maiming,and abducting, causing the
displacement of the largest number of our citizens in recent history. Beyond
the North East they extended their mindless killings, as far away as Abuja,
Kano And Kaduna.
But with new leadership and
renewed confidence our gallant military immediately began to put Boko Haram on
the back foot. We have restored broken-down relations with our neighbours,
Chad, Cameroon and Niger – allies without whom the war against terror would
have been extremely difficult to win. We have re-organized and equipped our
Armed Forces, and inspired them to heroic feats; we have also revitalized the
regional Multinational Joint Task Force, by providing the required funding and
leadership.
The positive results are clear
for all to see. In the last two years close to one million displaced persons
have returned home. 106 of our daughters from Chibok have regained their
freedom, after more than two years in captivity, in addition to the thousands
of other captives who have since tasted freedom.
Schools, hospitals and businesses
are springing back to life across the Northeast, especially in Borno State, the
epicentre of the crisis. Farmers are returning to the farms from which they
fled in the wake of Boko Haram. Finally, our people are getting a chance to
begin the urgent task of rebuilding their lives.
Across the country, in the Niger
Delta, and in parts of the North Central region, we are engaging with local
communities, to understand their grievances, and to create solutions that
respond to these grievances adequately and enduringly.
President Buhari’s New Vision for
the Niger Delta is a comprehensive peace, security and development plan that
will ensure that the people benefit fully from the wealth of the region, and we
have seen to it that it is the product of deep and extensive consultations, and
that it has now moved from idea to execution. Included in that New Vision is
the long-overdue environmental clean-up of the Niger Delta beginning with
Ogoni-land, which we launched last year.
More recent threats to security
such as the herdsmen clashes with farmers in many parts of the country
sometimes leading to fatalities and loss of livelihoods and property have also
preoccupied our security structures. We are working with State governments, and
tasking our security agencies with designing effective strategies and
interventions that will bring this menace to an end. We are determined to
ensure that anyone who uses violence, or carries arms without legal authority
is apprehended and sanctioned.
In the fight against corruption,
we have focused on bringing persons accused of corruption to justice. We
believe that the looting of public resources that took place in the past few
years has to be accounted for. Funds appropriated to build roads, railway
lines, and power plants, and to equip the military, that had been stolen or
diverted into private pockets, must be retrieved and the culprits brought to
justice. Many have said that the process is slow, and that is true, corruption
has fought back with tremendous resources and our system of administration of
justice has been quite slow. But the good news for justice is that our law does
not recognize a time bar for the prosecution of corruption and other crimes,
and we will not relent in our efforts to apprehend and bring corruption
suspects to justice. We are also re-equipping our prosecution teams, and part
of the expected judicial reforms is to dedicate some specific courts to the
trial of corruption cases.
We are also institutionalizing
safeguards and deterrents. We have expanded the coverage of the Treasury Single
Account (TSA). We have introduced more efficient accounting and budgeting
systems across the Federal Government. We have also launched an extremely
successful Whistleblower Policy.
The Efficiency Unit of the
Federal Ministry of Finance has succeeded in plugging leakages amounting to
billions of naira, over the last two years. We have ended expensive and
much-abused fertilizer and petrol subsidy regimes.
We have taken very seriously our
promise to save and invest for the future, even against the backdrop of our
revenue challenges, and we have in the last two years added US$500m to our
Sovereign Wealth Fund and US$87m to the Excess Crude Account. This is the very
opposite of the situation before now, when rising oil prices failed to
translate to rising levels of savings and investment.
Admittedly, the economy has
proven to be the biggest challenge of all. Let me first express just how
concerned we have been, since this administration took office, about the impact
of the economic difficulties on our citizens.
Through no fault of theirs, some
companies shut down their operations, others downsized; people lost jobs, had
to endure rising food prices. In some States civil servants worked months on
end without the guarantee of a salary, even as rents and school fees and other
expenses continued to show up like clockwork.
We have been extremely mindful of
the many sacrifices that you have had to make over the last few years. And for
this reason this administration’s work on the economic front has been targeted
at a combination of short-term interventions to cushion the pain, as well as
medium to long term efforts aimed at rebuilding an economy that is no longer
helplessly dependent on the price of crude oil.
Those short-term interventions
include putting together a series of bailout packages for our State
Governments, to enable them bridge their salary shortfalls – an issue the
President has consistently expressed his concerns about. We also began the hard
work of laying out a framework for our Social Intervention Programme, the most
ambitious in the history of the country.
One of the first tasks of the
Cabinet and the Economic Management Team was to put together a Strategic
Implementation Plan for the 2016 budget, targeting initiatives that would
create speedy yet lasting impact on the lives of Nigerians.
Indeed, much of 2016 was spent
clearing the mess we inherited and putting the building blocks together for the
future of our dreams; laying a solid foundation for the kind of future that you
deserve as citizens of Nigeria.
In his Budget Presentation Speech
to the National Assembly last December, President Buhari outlined our Economic
Agenda in detail, and assured that 2017 -would be the year in which you would
begin to see tangible benefits of all the planning and preparation work. It is
my pleasure to note that in the five months since he delivered that speech, we
have seen tremendous progress, as promised.
Take the example of our Social
Investment Programme, which kicked off at the end of 2016. Its Home Grown
School Feeding component is now feeding more than 1 million primary school
children across seven states and would be feeding three million by the end of
the year. N-Power, another component has engaged 200,000 unemployed graduates –
none of whom needed any ‘connections’ to be selected. Beneficiaries are already
telling the stories of how these initiatives have given them a fresh start in
their lives.
Micro credit to a million
artisans, traders and market men and women has begun. While conditional cash
transfers to eventually reach a million of the poorest and most vulnerable
households has also begun.
Road and power projects are
ongoing in every part of the country. In rail, we are making progress with our
plans to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to upgrade the
existing 3,500km narrow-gauge network. We have also in 2017 flagged-off
construction work on the Lagos-Ibadan leg of our standard-gauge network, and
are close to completing the first phase of Abuja’s Mass Transit Rail System.
In that Budget speech in
December, the President announced the take-off of the Presidential Fertilizer
Initiative. Today, five months on, that Initiative – the product of an
unprecedented bilateral cooperation with the Government of Morocco – has
resulted in the revitalisation of 11 blending plants across the country, the
creation of 50,000 direct and indirect jobs so far, and in the production of
300,000 metric tonnes of NPK fertilizer, which is being sold to farmers at
prices significantly lower than what they paid last year. By the end of 2017,
that Fertilizer Initiative would have led to foreign exchange savings of US$200
million; and subsidy savings of 60 billion naira.
The Initiative is building on the
solid gains of the Anchor Borrowers Programme, launched in 2015 to support our
rice and wheat farmers, as part of our move towards guaranteeing food security
for Nigeria.
All of this is evidence that we
are taking very seriously our ambition of agricultural self-sufficiency. I am
delighted to note that since 2015 our imports of rice have dropped by 90
percent, while domestic production has almost tripled. Our goal is to produce
enough rice to meet local demand by 2019.
In April, the President launched
our Economic Recovery and Growth Plan which built on the foundations laid by
the Strategic implementation Plan of 2016. The plan has set forth a clear
vision for the economic development of Nigeria. I will come back to this point
presently.
Another highlight of the
President’s Budget Speech was our work around the Ease of Doing Business
reforms. As promised we have since followed up with implementation and
execution. I am pleased to note that we are now seeing verifiable progress
across several areas, ranging from new Visa on Arrival scheme, to reforms at
our ports and regulatory agencies.
The President also promised that
2017 would see the rollout of Executive Orders to facilitate government
approvals, support procurement of locally made goods, and improve fiscal
responsibility. We have kept that promise. This month we issued three Executive
Orders to make it easier for citizens to get the permits and licenses they
require for their businesses, to mandate Government agencies to spend more of
their budgets on locally produced goods, and to promote budget transparency and
efficiency. The overarching idea is to make Government Agencies and Government
budgets work more efficiently for the people.
The impact of our Ease of Doing Business
work is gradually being felt by businesses small and large; its successful
take-off has allowed us to follow up with the MSME Clinics -our Small Business
support programme, which has taken us so far to Aba, Sokoto, Jos, Katsina, and
we expect to be in all other states in due course.
Let me note, at this point, that
several of our Initiatives are targeted at our young people, who make up most
of our population. From N-Power, to the Technology Hubs being developed
nationwide, to innovation competitions such as the Aso Villa Demo Day, and our
various MSME support schemes, we will do everything to nurture the immense
innovative and entrepreneurial potential of our young people. We are a nation
of young people, and we will ensure that our policies and programmes reflect
this.
One of the highlights of our
Power Sector Recovery Programme, which we launched in March, is a N701 billion
Naira Payment Assurance Scheme that will resolve the financing bottlenecks that
have until now constrained the operations of our gas suppliers and generation
companies. Let me assure that you will soon begin to see the positive impact of
these steps.
Our Solid Minerals Development
Fund has also now taken off, in line with our commitment to developing the
sector. Because of our unerring focus on Solid Minerals development over the
last two years, the sector has, alongside Agriculture, seen impressive levels
of growth – in spite of the recession.
On the whole, just as the
President promised in the Budget Speech, these early months of 2017 have seen
the flowering of the early fruit of all the hard work of our first eighteen
months.
We opened the year with an
overwhelmingly successful Eurobond Offer – evidence of continuing investor
interest in Nigeria. We have also launched the Economic Recovery and Growth
Plan (ERGP) 2017-2020, to build on the gains of last year’s Strategic
Implementation Plan. And the implementation of our 2017 Budget, which will soon
be signed into law, will bring added impetus to our ongoing economic recovery.
In the 2016 Budget we spent 1.2 Trillion Naira on infrastructure projects,
another milestone in the history of this country. Our 2017 Budget will double
that investment.
That budget also provides for
substantial investment to implement the rollout of Industrial Parks and Special
Economic Zones (SEZs), as well as our Social Housing Programme. The Industrial
Parks and Economic Zones will fulfill our ambition of making Nigeria a
manufacturing hub, while the Family Home Fund of our Social Housing Programme will
provide inexpensive mortgages for low-income individuals and families across
the country.
These plans offer yet more
evidence that we are ramping up the pace of work; the work of fulfilling all
that we promised. In the next two years we will build on the successes of the
last two. We have demonstrated a willingness to learn from our mistakes and to
improve on our successes. The critical points that we must address fully in the
next two years are : Agriculture and food security, Energy, (power and Petroleum,)
Industrialization and Transport infrastructure. Every step of the way we will
be working with the private sector, giving them the necessary incentives and
creating an environment to invest and do business.
Our vision is for a country that
grows what it eats and produces what it consumes. It is for a country that no
longer has to import petroleum products, and develops a lucrative petrochemical
industry. Very importantly it is for a country whose fortunes are no longer
tied to the price of a barrel of crude, but instead to the boundless talent and
energy of its people, young and old, male and female as they invest in diverse
areas of the economy.
And that vision is also for a
country where the wealth of the many will no longer be stolen by or reserved for
a few; and where the impunity of corruption – whether in the public or private
sectors – will no longer be standard operating practice; a land rid of bandits
and terrorists.
As citizens you all deserve a
country that works, not merely for the rich or connected, but for everyone. And
our promise to you is that we will, with your support and cooperation, take
every step needed to create that country of our dreams.
We also know that this journey
will of necessity take time. But we will not succumb to the temptation to take
short-cuts that ultimately complicate the journey. We did not find ourselves in
crises overnight, and we simply do not expect overnight solutions to our challenges.
The most important thing is that
we are on the right path, and we will not deviate from it, even in the face of
strong temptation to choose temporary gain over long-term benefit. As the
President has summed it up: “The old Nigeria is slowly but surely disappearing,
and a new era is rising.”
And so we commemorate this second
anniversary of our administration with confidence and optimism. I firmly
believe that we have put the most difficult phase behind us; and we are
witnesses to the ever-increasing intensity of the light at the end of the
tunnel. We ask for your continued cooperation and support, to enable us realise
all our best intentions and ambitions for Nigeria. On our part We will continue
to carry you along on this journey, speak to you, explain the challenges, and
share our Vision.
And while we all daily pre-occupy
ourselves with pursuing the Nigerian Dream – which is the desire to better our
lives and circumstances vigorously and honestly – it is inevitable that
grievances and frustrations will arise from time to time.
This is normal. What is not
normal, or acceptable, is employing these frustrations as justification for
indulging in discrimination or hate speech or hateful conduct of any kind, or
for seeking to undermine by violent or other illegal means the very existence
of the sovereign entity that has brought us all together as brothers and
sisters and citizens.
Nigeria belongs to all of us. No
one person or group of persons is more important or more entitled than the
other in this space that we all call home. And we have a responsibility to live
in peace and harmony with one another, to seek peaceful and constitutional
means of expressing our wishes and desires, and to resist all who might seek to
sow confusion and hatred for their own selfish interests.
Before I end this speech, let me
ask for your continued prayers for the restoration to full health and strength
and the safe return of our President.
I congratulate all of you on
today’s commemoration of this important day in the democratic calendar our
country. Nigeria is on a journey of greatness, and together we shall arrive at
the destination of our dreams.
May God bless you all, and bless
the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Laolu Akande
Senior Special Assistant to the
Acting President on Media & Publicity
Office of the Vice President
Aso Rock, Abuja
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