By SUNDAY ABBA, Abuja
Ahead of Nigeria’s 2023 General Elections, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) Peter Obi was at the Chattam House on Monday where he gave an insight into how his government, if elected into office, would pursue reforms that would turn around the fortunes of the country without inflicting pains on the people.
He said, “First, we will ensure that the reforms that we’ll pursue does not in any way affect the livelihood of our hard working and efficient civil servants.”
The presidential hopeful who noted that corruption would be fought head on said one policy that is critical to fighting corruption that his administration would introduce is a new budgetary system based on public accountability, objectives setting, and programme implementation as against the extant principle of revenue mobilisation, expenditure, allocation, borrowing without emphasis on monitoring among others.
He noted that the process of budgetary monitoring, evaluating would be strengthened within the presidency.
“We’ll enforce principle of performance, auditing, institutionalise monitoring and evaluation process of the entire public service delivery as a primary means of actualising our vision of a new Nigeria.
These reforms will intstitutionalise our personal involvement of both the President and the Vice President in certain budgetary objectives of MDAs. Budgetary monitoring and evaluation will
strengthened within the presidency.”
Obi who lamented the current status of Nigeria as a consuming nation said he has plans to steering the country from being a consumption nation to a production.
On electricity, Obi who rolled out several policies his administration would implement if elected, said their fifth policy is to build an expansive infrastructure for efficient power supply, road an air transportation network through integrated Public Private Partnership.
“Firstly, we will ensure that we deal with the issue of transmission and distribution.
“However, we will immediately complete 2.3 billion Nigeria – Siemens network improvement deal to achieve a stable 7000 megawatts (MWs) by the end of this year, 11,000 MWs by the end of 2024 and 25,000 megawatts by 2025.
We will support local factory capacity and encourage local production through which many jobs will be created,” he said.
