AS agenda for an election, the President’s manifesto, ‘Agenda for Transformation’ made fantastic reading with its picture of a government that wants to change Nigeria by transferring it to the path of enduring greatness. Great promises create great expectations.

Who would have been against these nuggets of transformation?

·Expansion of downstream sector of oil and gas for one million jobs

·Provision of adequate access to economic resources to grow small businesses

·Removal of barriers to increased productivity

“The provision of cheap funding to SMEs will come as a great relief to entrepreneurs who need to reduce their financial costs as they try to deal with high production costs for generating power and providing other operational infrastructure,” the President said while he campaigned.

Last August, government launched what it called “roadmap for the power sector.” Government’s expectations were that it would significantly  improve electricity supply level within the next six months (by next week) when most projects of the National Integrated Power Programme, NIPP, come on stream, and the transmission and distribution aspects of the electricity chain are repositioned. Power supply has not improved an inch since then. It could have worsened.

Promises of jobs, Enterprise Development Centres, Industrial Clusters, and Job Centres in collaboration with the Small and Medium-scale Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, SMEDAN, and 23 Enterprise Development Centres were on the cards last year. They have remained at the promises stage.

Similar promises of improvements were made for agriculture, education, health, justice, water, transportation, and security. Nigerians understand that these promises would take time to deliver, they will wait, but they expect that the foundations to their realisation should be laid now.

There have to be financing and administrative initiatives to achieve them. Money saved from removal of petroleum subsidy cannot execute a fraction of the items in the agenda. Investments in electricity are central to the success of all the projects. Why have NIPP projects not achieved the targets set for them last year? What are the implications of the delays in the electricity projects?

In deriving 1,613 projects for a transformation he expects to accomplish by 2015, the President might have gone too fast without considering the weight he is moving. Outside the dedicated attention to oil and gas, we suggest that he concentrates on electricity, agriculture, education, and basic infrastructure. Many projects, spread across the country, may have their political mileage, but they have prospects of stumping the entire transformation agenda.

Security is a priority. In these times, it is consuming more attention and resources than even the President anticipated. The President has to make choices, difficult choices, to match the ones the people are making.