Speech: Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) 2017 Graduation Ceremony National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies

It is a special pleasure to be here at this graduation ceremony, of the Senior Executive Course 39 of 2017 of the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, and I bring you the very warm felicitations of President Muhammadu Buhari, President, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I congratulate the participants of Senior Executive Course 39, for your excellent performance and your elevation to the privilege of Member of the National Institute, MNI.

Your presentation to Mr. President last week, Friday 17th November, on the theme “Science, Technology and Innovation for the Development of Agriculture & Agro-Allied Industries in Nigeria,” was both scholarly and practical, and will be an important reference in refining and implementing policy in this important area.

I also congratulate family and friends, and especially spouses of participants on this joyful occasion.

NIPSS occupies an important place in our national policy discourse, especially through its policy-relevant training and research outputs. Notably, the NIPSS alumni provide a patriotic repository of knowledge that is very often deployed in support of national development objectives.

Today’s event is significant. It is at once a celebration of success, and in many ways, also symbolic of the opportunities that will arise from completion of a year of rigorous learning and reflection, for you, and the Federal Government. And it also provides me an opportunity to share some thoughts on the trajectory of our national economic development with the Nigerian policy elite, to which distinguished group, you now rightly belong.

I am going to focus on the economy, where we are, and where we are heading in the next 12 months. What are the policy choices we have made? Why have we made those choices? Are those policy choices working?

From the very beginning of our administration when Mr. President asked me to head the economic management team, he made it clear that in his view, the major reason for the slow development of our nation and the poverty of millions of our people, was corruption and mismanagement of public funds & resources. And that fighting corruption and mismanagement of public resources was as much an economic imperative, as it was a law and order issue. I agreed.

We, from that point, put in place structures that would ensure prudent and transparent management of resources. In July 2015, the President ordered that all MDAs funds should be paid into the Treasury Single Account. This ended years of MDAs keeping secret bank accounts, in some cases putting public funds in fixed deposit for interest far below market rates. Banks would then lend money back to government by buying treasury bills at substantially higher interest. Today, government knows exactly how much we have, and we are saving significantly.

Early in 2016, an Efficiency Unit was set up under the Federal Ministry of Finance to reduce wastage, plug leakages and foster greater fiscal transparency. The Efficiency Unit has enforced several deliberate cost-cutting measures including the removal or reduction of sitting allowances for civil servants in many cases, and saved over 1 billion a year, stopping the procurement of souvenirs, and printing for government programmes, we saved another N1billion.

By reviewing travel expenditures, and negotiating procurement discounts, we saved N15billion. We have also removed or reduced meals and refreshments for meetings, and saved another N1billion annually.

We stopped the siphoning of funds through ghost workers by insisting that all MDAs must be on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) across government, and also mandated the use of BVN. Over 461 Federal MDAs have been captured on the system thus far, with the objective being able to enroll all of them. We are now saving N25billion a month, from cleaning up the payroll in this way. The President has also ordered all Armed Forces personnel to be captured on IPPIS.

It is important to understand, what these measures to block leakages and stealing of public resources mean for economic performance. I will demonstrate that impact.

When we came into office, over 22 States were owing salaries. They were owing despite the fact that between 2011 and 2015, Nigeria earned its highest ever revenues from oil. Oil was selling at between $100 and $115 a barrel. Yet reserves between 2014 and 2015 fell from $35billion to $28billion in April 2015. When we came into office, oil prices fell as low as $28 a barrel, the unrest in the Niger Delta, especially the vandalization of pipelines and oil and gas assets reduced the production at some point by over a million barrels a day. Revenues dropped by as much as 60%.

But with 60% less revenue, we started a series of bailouts for the States, to enable them pay salaries and pensions. With 60% less revenue, we were able to provide about N1.3trillion for capital expenditure, the largest amount for capital in our nation’s history.

For the first time in five years we saved $500million, and invested another $500million in the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Today our external reserves stands at $35billion the highest in the past four years.

We have made the point, that Nigeria is not poor because it has no resources, it is poor because a lot its resources are stolen or mismanaged. We
can do a lot more with far less, if we don’t allow stealing.

Now let us for a moment, reflect on where the Nigerian economy is today. The economic focus and direction of the Buhari administration is set out in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan – the ERGP. The plan is based on a set of principles, broad principles, and certain key action points including eliminating corruption in government procurement and processes, prudent management of resources, social inclusion, overcoming constraints such as power, petrol and skills shortages, promotion of the private sector, and use of the market mechanism where possible.

We have worked hard to keep faith with these crucial principles. In particular we are committed to ensuring that Nigeria does not return to the years of corruption and waste, where people at the highest levels of government simply converted to private use, funds and public resources meant for the building of public infrastructure and the provision of services.

We must pay attention to what we are seeing today, and some of the shameless noises of those who brought our nation to its knees, many of whom still have looted funds in their possession, trying to rewrite history and hoodwink the populace again. We say never again!

Distinguished guests ladies and gentlemen, today, regarding our economy, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness is giving way to the light. Let’s begin with the macroeconomic story.

The decline in growth which started in 2014, has been reversed with the third quarter figures released earlier this week, showing that the economy has truly exited recession with the growth of 1.4%.

A further analysis of the Q2 2017 GDP results indicates that the recovery was driven largely by the performance in agriculture, industry, solid minerals and crude oil and gas production. Agriculture, which is a main focus of this administration, as stated in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), grew strongly throughout 2016 despite the contraction in the overall economy, continued to grow in 2017 recording a 3.06% growth in Q3 2017.

Industry which had contracted for nine consecutive quarters, but recorded its first positive growth of 1.45% in Q2 2017, and it has grown stronger in Q3 2017, growing by 8.83% compared to a contraction of -12.66% a year earlier. This represents the strongest growth in industry since Q2 2014, when industry grew at a similar rate of 8.97%.

The oil sector also grew strongly, partly due to actions of government which has led to stable oil production and an improved situation in the Niger Delta, as well as oil prices remaining steady. Oil production GDP grew very strongly by 25.89% in Q3 2017 compared to 3.53% in Q2 2017, and a contraction of -23.04% in Q3 2016.

Inflation continues to fall from a peak of 18.72% in January, to 15.91% today. Similarly, as noted earlier, our reserves are now at about $35 billion while the exchange rate regime has been stabilized. We are confident that the Naira will continue to appreciate.

One of our biggest priorities as a government was making the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us better. Right from the presidential campaigns that preceded our coming to serve, we had made it very clear that we would be a government for the poor and vulnerable. We designed an ambitious Social Investment Programme to accomplish this, comprising four initiatives; a jobs’ scheme for unemployed graduates, a micro-credit scheme targeting SMEs, a Home-grown School Feeding Scheme, providing one free meal a day to primary school pupils, and a Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme for the poorest Nigerians across the country.

The Social Investment Programme kicked off a year ago, with the recruitment of 200,000 young Nigerian graduates for the first phase of N- Power. These young people have been deployed across the 774 Local Government Areas of the country, as Teaching Assistants in public primary schools, Public Health Assistants in primary health centres, and as Agricultural Extension Service Assistants in various agricultural programmes.

Today, a year later, we have just pre-selected an additional 300,000 young unemployed graduates, and they will be further engaged in the N-Power programme.

The Home Grown School Feeding Programme now provides a free, nutritious meal, one a day to over 5 million children across 19 States, and our target is 5.5million children before the end of 2017.

In addition to providing nutrition for children in the first three years of primary education, the school feeding programme buys food from local farmers, and employs almost 55,000 cooks in 28,249 schools. Other participants in the food value chain such as processors and transporters also benefit indirectly from this programme.

While we were laying the groundwork of the rollout of the Social Investment Programmes, we began to aggressively invest in plugging Nigeria’s huge infrastructure gap. One of the reasons why we are where we are today, is that over the last three decades, we failed to invest substantially in infrastructure to any appreciable degree, even as our population grew.

Much of the funds that should have been invested in infrastructure simply cannot be explained. We wasted no time addressing this. Even at a time when our resources had dropped dramatically, and with little by way of savings, we invested in roads, railway and power projects.

Work resumed on several projects that had been abandoned or suspended before we took office. We completed and commissioned the railway line connecting Kaduna to Abuja, the first Standard Gauge line in Nigeria. The Abuja Light Rail project, which was only half-completed when we inherited it, is now almost ready to go into operation. When completed it will be the first functioning urban light rail in Nigeria.

Our successful engagement with the Chinese Government has yielded fruit; construction has started on the Lagos -Ibadan segment of a new Standard Gauge railway line between Lagos and Kano, and will soon commence on the coastal railway from Lagos to Calabar, which will open up the Southeast and Niger delta in unprecedented ways. We are now providing in the 2018 budget, the commencement of work on the Mambilla hydro-electric project.

However, even if we invested our entire annual budget on infrastructure, it would not be enough to fill the gap. So as a government it was clear, that the greatest impact would come from the efforts of private capital, while we act as enabler and catalyst, creating an environment conducive for investors and businesses.

This is why we have revised and prioritized the Road Trust Fund, to enable private firms to partner with the Federal Government to build, repair, and maintain roads in return for tax credits. Meanwhile, work continues on the long overdue Second Niger Bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, and other major arterial roads like the Ilorin-Jebba-Mokwa-Birnin-Gwari-Kaduna Road, and the Enugu-Port-Harcourt Road to mention a few.

dis thing too long na