President to give annual country report from next year,Says Monye

By Henry Umoru
SECRETARY, National Planning Commission (NPC), Professor Sylvester Monye has disclosed  that with effect from next year, the Federal government will introduce a legislation where sitting President would give an annual country report.

Speaking in Abuja at the forum for Directors of Planning, Research and Statistics in Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), Professor Monye also revealed that those who work in the Planning, Research and Statistics(PRS) of the Ministry of power do not know anything about how the set target of the 6,000 megawatts by the end of this year could be achieved, just as he said that the annual report by the president would be dependent on what the PRS departments feed the government with.

President Yaradua

“Now, if you ask people who work in PRS in ministry of power, how they tend to achieve the 6,000 in 2009 and the 10,000 in 2010, they have no idea. Quote me on this one, they have no clue and yet they are PRS (Planning, research and statistic). They have no idea on what is going on. By next year, you quote me on this one, every ministry will account for the budget they receive.

“What it means is that if you work for education, we use to have UPE where every community will have a structure or a building in union with UPE. You will see UPE classroom. What the department of PRS in education does not tell us is the impact of that classroom on school enrollment. The quality of teaching, the quality of output, we need to know now”, he said.

Against this backdrop, he said that the government has concluded arrangements where by next year, all the ministries will give account of how it spent its budget, adding that the government was in the process of developing the first development plan of vision 2020.

The Secretary who expressed his disappointment over the low turn out of participates, warned that Directors must wake up to the new challenges of the government or be sacked., adding that event like this was not optional.

According to him, “Over the years, we drifted away from planning and most departments began to concentrate on issues other than planning. Over the years, we have forgotten what it is to do clearance work. As a matter of fact, some of the places I have worked, the experts i.e. the intellectual arm of any ministry was in PRS and therefore if you wanted a good speech for any minister, you just call on the director of the PRS and say: “can you give me a transcript?”

“I mean that is really the nature of PRS. It is not for the failures, it is people who are intellectually inclined or tested. Anybody that is posted to PRS and you think you cannot talk to me, just say this is not for me. I need more capacity building in order to do this assignment.

“So, PRS is not for everybody, it is for the brightest and the best. I said this because the way we are moving, we are taking a cue from countries like Japan. In those countries, you know we talk about the Asian tigers all the time. One of the things that they have is intellectual capacity, brain box.

In fact, the minister of foreign affairs was reminding me at a meeting in Browses last week about what Bill Clinton said in Nigeria . What he said was that time has passed where we think about what is under our feet but we should now think about those who will succeed are those who think about what is above their feet.

“Most of the Asian tigers don’t have anything under their feet, what they have is in their brain and that is what they are using to rule the world today. So, for us in Nigeria , this is the beginning of our recognition that PRS is really the future. It is not good to say that in PRS, we have tenders board.

As a matter of fact, there should be no tender’s board in PRS. Tenders board has no business whatsoever because, it is not intellectual challenging. So, it has no home in department of PRS.

“That is really the way I see PRS and that is really the way it will be. It’s not going for the government of people we don’t like. Like, if you don’t like some people, you send them to PRS or if you are not favoured, you will be sent to PRS or those in PRS seeing themselves as this is where I was put.

No, that’s not going to be the case. It will be the place where only we put the best and the brightest. I will tell you why it will be the case.