Nigeria hasn’t been able to implement 50% of her annual budgets since the year 2011, according to the National Secretary, National Association of Project Management Professionals, and CEO of iCentra, Taopheek Babayeju, in an interview with the Punch.
“At the last count, in 2011 or 2012, it was about N1.7tn. And it will interest you to know that in the past three or four years, we have not achieved 50 per cent projects’ implementation across the country. So if about 50 per cent of the budget is not implemented in terms of delivering projects, are we moving forward?
“In our budgets, you will notice that less than 30 per cent of the whole budget is often allocated to capital projects and about 20 per cent is used for servicing debts while the remaining 50 per cent is on recurrent expenditure.
According to him a country with such a budget is not going to develop, and that Nigeria needs to implement 30 to 60 percent of her budget for capital projects “because that is when there will be jobs for the unemployed among us.”
In order to correct this anomaly and save the situation, he said Nigeria needs a National Project Management Commission or a Directorate that will oversee all these projects done by either the National Planning Commission, the Federal Ministry of Works, etc.
“The commission will see to the integration of these projects at every turn. This directorate or commission could be under the NPC, but the important thing is that we should as a nation be able to see our performance in terms of project execution across the country.”
“Millennium development goals, Vision 2020 and other similar initiatives, need to be plugged into one body that will have their own individual managers or a programme director. This is because when you start any project in Nigeria, there should be lessons learnt from it, but this seems not to be happening nowadays because we lack a directorate with a major objective of monitoring these projects and see that they are executed properly.
#Nigeria
