 Welcome back. We're set for first conversation this morning and of course that we'll advertise rising from an emergency session and its first meeting of the year. The National Economic Council has endorsed the Nigeria Agenda 2050. It's designed to take the country to upper middle income status and subsequently to the status of high income country. At the meeting presented over by the head of the chairman of the National Economic Council, Vice President Yemio Shebajo. The Agenda 2050 was presented by the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning to the state governors and other members of the NEC, including federal ministers. Speaking after the presentation and discussion by council members, the Vice President of Nigeria, Professor Yemio Shebajo, in a statement by his spokesman, Laolu Okonde, observed that the plan, quote, captures a lot of the expectations for Nigeria in the future and hopefully implementation which is key if effectively done. Also commenting on the agenda of the Agenda 2050, Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Prince Klem Agba said the federal government is keen or has taken steps rather, which are unprecedented in ensuring the operationalization of the plan, especially with the inauguration of the Staring Committee of the National Economic Council. Are we asking what does this creation of a development plan mean for Nigeria? We're glad to have Nika Gulli, a public affairs analyst, join us to discuss this development. Nika, good morning to you. Nice to see you. I can see Nika not smiling. I can see a slight smile. I mean, you should be really beaming smiling from ear to ear with the President's announcement this morning. There you go. Thank you so much, Kofi. Good morning. Merci. Good morning. Good morning, our viewers all around the world. Yes, I'm not smiling because this is a country of confusion. The Supreme Court has made a ruling and once that happens, rule of law demands that everybody, including the President, should respect that. And if the President is not happy with the ruling of the Supreme Court, President needs to go back to the Supreme Court and get the Supreme Court to upturn himself. That is the independence of the judiciary. We have three arms of government and the President cannot be carried on as if he is a law upon himself. So that is why I'm not happy about what the President said this morning. Okay. That being said, let's look at this development plan that the Vice President is talking about. And of course, through the National Economic Council, as we earlier said, and for those who are wondering, what exactly do development plans do for nations around the world? Of course, you know how the Chinese do. They have the most popular, the most famous development plans in the world. We're looking at, like they said, taking Nigeria to upper middle-income status and subsequently high-income status. We're looking at gender 2050. What is the role of development planning in the development of countries like Nigeria? There is a maxim that says if you don't plan, then you plan to fail. Everybody needs to plan as individuals, as corporate entities, as families. Just everybody. You have to have a plan. So a development plan is a strategic long-term plan by a nation to chart the way forward. To say in X number of years, this is where we want to be. And that is planning for everybody. A family must also have a plan whereby you say, this family, where are we going? You can't just be going about endlessly. I mean, you cannot start a journey without knowing where your destination is. So a plan is basically to set the structures in place for your destination. That is, for Nigeria, with a gender 2050, we are heading to this direction and by 2050, we want to arrive at that destination. So in a nutshell, that's what the plan is. It's a future statement of where you want to be. But the plan has to come with concrete steps as to how you are going to arrive at that destination. So I'm in Abuja now. If I want to start a journey and I say that I want to be in Makodi next week Tuesday, I have to have a plan on how I'm going to. Okay, we seem to have a network interruption with Nick Agule there. Nick, are you back? Okay. But interesting, of course, Nick has rightly given us the importance of this national plan, development plan, you would call it. Nick Agule, if you're back and can hear me, please continue with the point you were making. Yes, yes, I'm back. Can you hear me now? Loud and clear, we can. Okay, fine. So I was saying that a plan is not made for the sake of, say, you make a plan. You make a plan and then pack up that plan with concrete steps on how you are going to get to that intended destination. So I was trying to give the analogy that I am in Abuja now. I have the intention of going to Benway to vote next week. I can't sit here in Abuja and say I'll be in Benway next week to vote when I have not put what will take me to Benway. Am I going to walk? Am I going to cycle? Am I going on a bike? Am I going to go by a car? If it is by car, am I driving? Am I going to go by commercial vehicles or how? So if that is not the how, then the plan just remains a plan for the sake of planning. Next week we come and I'll be in Abuja because I didn't put the how in place. And that is what is lacking in most of Nigeria's plans. Well, I mean, I like the fact that you said that that's what lacking in most of Nigerian's plans. We've had several development plans as a nation and you want to ask yourself, should we be excited about this plan? Making reference to the previous plan. One of such is Vision 2020. Now Vision 2020, if you ask yourself today, where is Vision 2020, what happened? Now, from the onset, there were several criticism behind the major targets of the vision. I wanted to juxtapose that Vision 2020 with Vision 2025 and answer if you think that this vision is going to see the light of day or if it's already set out to fill. Now, the Vision 2020 was set out to propel Nigerian to the league of 20 best economies translating to having a GDP of at least $900 billion by 2020 when you compare that to what we actually made in 2008. And so I ask you, do you think that these 2050 vision agenda that we have is very realistic? And you know, it meets the needs of the people that it's there's a connection between the people and this plan or this policy. Thank you very much for that question. First, I am not excited at all about this plan. Totally not excited. Coming off the backdrop of what you have just listed now. We have had plans in the past that have just remained plans on paper. You know, we had oppression of feeding nations. We had Green Revolution. Then we had the Vision 2020 that you said 2020 that you have said we had another vision 2025. And now we're having this 2050 because these plans are just being put on paper and nothing concrete is being done about them. So that's why I am not excited. And the other reason why I'm not excited is that to be honest, the Buhari government should be writing their handover notes. Honestly, I mean, the Buhari government has got probably about three months left in office. This is a time that every department, ministry and agency of government from the highest to the lowest level, we should be making their handover notes. This is not a time for the Buhari government to start embarking on a plan. They could have embarked on the plan in their first year in office. And now that they have gone eight years in office, they should be telling us that, okay, the plan we set up eight years ago, this is what we have achieved. This is what we have achieved. This is what we have achieved. That's what they should have been telling us in the last three months they have in office, not sitting down in their offices, spending humongous money and putting a plan in place which the next government can as well just throw it into the bin. So that's the other thing that I'm not excited about. The third thing that I'm not excited about is that I have looked for this Nigeria agenda 2050 document online. I couldn't find it. So I was not able to even see the details or what's in the plan. We're going by what we have already said about past plans. I know that we make these plans without taking care of the fundamentals. There are fundamentals that grow in economy. I mean economic development comes from setting fundamentals. And the very first fundamental is the rule of law. The rule of law is what brings all citizens on an equal pedestal. Whether you are the president or you are a cleaner or you are whoever in society, you must come before the law. In the society that does not have rule of law cannot have development. If you look around the world, Nick, okay, so Nick, I'd like us to, you know, take a breather there and, you know, look at someone. I know that, I mean, this policy has not been launched, however, is still, you know, in the working or proposed however it is. But, you know, one of the highlights of this plan or agenda is that it sets to transform the country into an upper middle income country with a significant improvement in the capital income. And you know, you know, the capital income currently for Nigerians. Yes. So that is a big question. The million dollar question is that how are we going to move from a low income country to a middle level income country and then to a high level income country? We have a capital income of $2,000 and the likes of Singapore have $30,000, $40,000. So how are we going to do that? And you see, there are basic fundamentals, like I was saying, the first that this cause, which is the rule of law, is totally absent as shown by the president this morning, comes from TV, totally disregards the ruling of the highest court in the land, which investor looking at that president is going to bring his money in this country and invest when he knows that the court in the land can give him the investor judgment and the president can routinely disregard it. That is number one. Number two, electricity. There's something called electricity. Electricity is the life blood of any modern economy. Without electricity, all your development plans, all the agendas, all the visions, everything you have in place is not going to work because with electricity, you are like a doctor who wants to heal a body without blood. Imagine a doctor trying to save a body, make the body to thrive, wants a body to flourish and do well and be healthy and there is no blood in that body. Electricity is the blood of the economy. And Nigeria, as we speak today, messy, is delivering 3000 megawatts of electricity to 200 million people. You know, the likes of Qatar with less than 3 million people, which is the less than the population of Abuja we are speaking from, is delivering 8000 megawatts. You know, so we just make these plans, but we don't take the steps to bring these plans to light. Look, if you give Nigeria 30,000 megawatts, if we move from the current 3000 to only 30,000, development will start coming to this country. The private sector will begin to thrive. You will not even know that this is Nigeria again. When you will see our very industrious people beginning to do things, beginning to manufacture, beginning to create jobs and all of that. So these guys just sit in Abuja. They make these plans, but they are taking no concrete steps. The other sector is steel, iron and steel. We have all the steel plants across the country that have been allowed to die. They are dead. Without steel, how can you develop? There can be no infrastructure. If you don't have steel, we are burning away our gas. And gas is the fuel for development. That is the fuel for industrialization. We produce it, we burn it. We are not putting it to use. So these are some of the pillars that activate development. We talk to you doing these things. Look, you are like a student who says, I want to make a first-class degree. I have never even bought a jump form. You want to make a first-class degree in four years time and you have not bought a jump form. I'm going to talk about you enrolling in school. And that is the story of Nigeria. We're not taking care of the things that will give us the development. So 2050 will come and it will still go down the drain like 2020 or 2025. That's the way I see it, except for some changes. All right. We just have a couple of minutes to go. So I'll ask you to make this quite quick. What's your assessment of, because Messi talked about Vixen, 2020 which was put in place by a previous administration and when Buhari came in, following the recession that was on ground and continued in his administration, he came up with the economic recovery and growth plan ERGP 2017 to 2020. And when he inaugurated this steering committee in the year 2020 or 2021, he said that for this current plan, he said they had to replace or have a successor plan to Vixen 2020 and the economic recovery and growth plan. We may not be able to adjudge this administration, Buhari's administration on the Vixen 2020 since he didn't put it in place. But on the economic recovery and growth plan, which touted a lot, we kept talking about lifting a certain number of persons out of poverty, looking at a million development goals or which became the sustainable development goals and know that how do you think the Buhari administration fared with that economic recovery and growth plan? And how do you think that would affect how they will fare with this one if the APC wins the forthcoming election? Okay, yes. So thank you for the question. First on Vixen 2020. We are witnessing to either as a total failure. The vision said in the year 2020, which is three years ago, will be one of the top 20 industrialized nations. We're not even top 150. Nigeria is still at the bottom of every human development index. Every single one of them, we are counting the lowest. So that vision was just dead on arrival. When 2023, we can make a statement about it. It's a total failure. Buhari's vision as it came in is also a total failure. As you can see, everything in Nigeria has gone southwards. The inflation rate is going southwards. The foreign exchange rate is going southwards. Cost of petrol is going southwards. Unemployment is going southwards. Power supply is going southwards. Fuel scarcity is going southwards. Everything is going southwards. So whatever it is that the Buhari government put in their vision or plan has failed because of empirical evidence. We're Nigerians. We're Nigerians. We're experiencing it. If things improve, we know. But things are not improving. Reported in Nigeria is feeling the pinch. Feeling except those who have access to maybe a few subsidy money or they are round tripping the dollar into the power market. Those who are making money without lifting a finger. But for the rest of us in Nigeria, everybody is feeling the pinch. Yeah. I just saw the places on your table. We are out of time. We have to go. But the priorities of that economic recovery and growth plan, they said at the time, as of 2017, stabilizing the macroeconomic environment with low inflation, low inflation. They talked about using agriculture to achieve food security, create jobs and save foreign exchange on food imports. They talked about ensuring energy sufficiency, power and petroleum products by delivering at least 10 gigawatts of operational capacity by 2020. They said improving Nigeria's inadequate transportation infrastructure to support the economy and reduce the major cost and constraint of businesses. Okay. We know what happened with the airlines and how much we are paying. So I think this is just driving home the point that you are making that we just failed, really just woefully failed. Nick, thank you so much for your time. F9, coffee, it is F9, F9, F9 on everything you have mentioned that is part of that plan. F9. Nick, we have to go. We are witnessing it. We are seeing it. We have to go, Nick. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you so much. Nigerians, next week Saturday is the death. We are going to elect a new president and members of the National Assembly. Please, please, I need them for you. I need them. Please. Let's go and do this. Let's go and do this. 25th of February, next week Saturday. All right. Nobody should stay behind. Yes, we have to go now. Thank you so much. Nick Agoulet, we take a break and when we return, we'll continue with our conversation here. And for the second leg, we'll be looking at the issue of gender equality or inequality. Have a look at it. Please stay with us. Good morning.