A GLIMMER of hope for a better 2013 came Thursday from the Presidency as it disclosed that President Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation agenda in the areas of power supply, agriculture, security and infrastructure would begin to yield rich harvest for the benefit of the people next year.Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, who spoke Thursday in Lagos at an interactive session with journalists to review the administration’s achievements in 2012, said that despite the impression created in some quarters, the year was not all gloom and doom but rather recorded significant achievements in various sectors of the economy.
Giving insight into some of the achievements, Okupe said that despite the challenges, the administration, in 2012, was able to deliver on a number of promises to the people while setting the stage for even better performance in 2013.
According to him, at the end of “the second quarter, the economy recorded 6.28 per cent growth compared to 5.4 per cent forecast for sub-Saharan Africa, with Nigeria now a choice destination for investors in Africa and has attracted about $9 billion in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in one year, even as foreign reserves now stand at $45.68 billion, the highest in over two years.”
On power, he said the President Jonathan administration had been able to achieve, through the roadmap for the power sector, improved power supply in many parts of the country with power generation reaching 4502 megawatts, the highest since Nigeria returned to civil democracy in 1999.
The limitations imposed by inadequate transmission infrastructure, he said, were being tackled, while funding for the expansion of gas supply to power plants had been made available.
He added: “With a projected generation of a minimum of 7,000 megawatts by mid-2013, as well as the effective privatisation of the distribution and generation sub-sectors and the commercialisation of the transmission arm of the Nigerian power sector, economic activities are bound to receive significant boost in the coming year.”
Okupe said Nigeria had reached an unprecedented 60 per cent sufficiency in rice production, with 14 new rice mills with capacity to process 240 metric tons of rice set up by the private sector while in addition, $1.2 billion was secured by the Federal Government to install 100 large-scale rice processing mills to produce 2.1 million metric tons of rice annually.
“By 2014, Nigeria’s 167 million population will feed on rice grown and processed locally as we would have attained 100 per cent self-sufficiency in rice production, like we just did in the production of cement,” he said.
The initiatives of the Federal Government in the agricultural sector in 2012 resulted in the creation of about two million new jobs among rural dwellers, he added, and in 2013, the administration will implement a Young Graduates Commercial Farmers Scheme, which will absorb 780,000 graduates in its first phase and provide an estimated four million jobs in the sector in the first year.
In the area of infrastructure, Okupe said the Federal Government has given a new lease of life to the aviation sector through massive rehabilitation and reconstruction of Nigerian airports. By the end of October this year, he disclosed, over half of the 22 airports earmarked for rehabilitation and reconstruction had been commissioned for public use.
Government would also construct five new airport terminals in Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt, Abuja and Enugu in early 2013 as well as six cargo terminals to be managed under a Public Private Partnership scheme, Okukpe said.
According to him, giant strides were made in the transportation sector with the inauguration of the Lagos-Kano train service, the ongoing rehabilitation of the eastern rail line from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri as well as the fixing of the Zaria/Kaura Namoda rail route, among others.
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