By Emmanuel Elebeke

Chairman, House Committee on National Planning and Economic Development and President of the Pan African Parliament, Hon. Bethel Amadi, has faulted the nation’s budgeting and formulation process and accused other agencies involved in the process of hijacking the role of the national Planning Commission, NPC.

Hon. Amadi made the assertion during the inauguration of boards of three parastatals under the National Planning Commission, NPC.
Amadi noted that the NPC had not been playing any major role in the nations’ budgeting processes, which he said has always resulted in poor results.

He urged the NPC to assume its full responsibility and be more involved in the budgeting processes and formulation of the budget in line with the clearly defined national plan.

“We are convinced that the role of National Planning Commission, NPC   in the preparation of national budget, so far, has not been felt, and we have said that many times.

“NPC and its parastatals and agencies should be more involved in the budgeting process and formulation to ensure that the budget is in line with the clearly defined national plan.

“We as a committee have sat over and over again, despite the need to have the budget office completely overseeing the budgeting process under the ministry of finance, the role and input of National Planning Commission should not in anyway be undermined,” he said.

Earlier in his speech, the Supervising Minister of National Planning Commission, Amb.   Bashir Yuguda , charged the new board members to live up to their expectations and   the mandate the President   reposed in them.

The Minister described the three agencies as great pillars of the economy, upon which the Transformation Agenda of federal government relies on.

He urged them to use their wealth of experience and expertise to make quality inputs capable of assisting the NPC to achieve its set goals.

He said: “We have just inaugurated the boards of all the parastatals under the Commission, NISER, CMD and NBS. The inauguration is to charge the board members to live up to expectation and to the mandate the president has delegated them. I urged them to help plan better for Nigeria with their wealth of experience.

“I have no doubt that you will bring your wealth of experience to bear as we work towards achieving the Transformation Agenda of the present administration. The focus of this administration on performance and results, as you are all aware, is underlined by the need for a fundamental paradigm shift from the old way of not paying enough attention to measuring performance, or measuring it only by the amount of activities undertaken, or monies spent, to a new way that emphasises the delivery of development results to Nigerians.

“Therefore, we need to develop the capacity of our workforce through regular training and retraining for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness using the Centre for Management Development (CMD).”