The development, coming a few days after the declaration of Bola Tinubu as the President-Elect from the 25th February polls, InsideBusinessNG discovered, is to avoid delay in starting the new administration.
The process is driven by the Vice President-elect, Kashim Shettima while the committee to scout for creditable candidates for ministerial positions is chaired by a sitting minister.
“Various lobby groups including traditional rulers and opinion leaders are meeting while technocrats with untainted pedigree within and outside the APC across the six geographical units of the country are the target of the new administration”, according to a source who is familiar with the development.
Findings by InsideBusinessNG show that priority is given to the economy and efforts are being channeled into finding technocrats with the capacity to retool the economy from its current prostrate situation.
Biodun Adedipe, Chief Executive of Lagos-based Economic Associates Ltd, a research and investment advisory firm commenting on the development, said professionals, and not politicians, should be engaged to handle some key ministries and agencies.
He cited key economic ministries like Finance, and Budget and Planning, advising that the two ministries that currently exist as one should be separated.
“Without professionals in those key economic ministries, it may not augur well. Finance is key; Planning is key; in fact, one of the things that I will recommend is to split what they have now as Budget & Planning, away from Finance. “They should split it and take it back to where it was. What we had before now was Budget & Planning together, and, separate from Finance.
“The current Ministry of Finance, Budget and Planning is overloaded. In fact, even functionally, it is not done because Finance is basically Treasury which is about how to generate revenue, allocate and disburse while the Budget & Planning ministry handles the medium, and long term national plans”, Adedipe explained.
Beyond these, Adedipe also recommended a “Strict Performance Management” where every minister has a schedule of duties defined in terms of goals, specifically, to achieve and on which basis their aggregate performance is evaluated.
The public ratings of President Muhammadu Buhari started to drop in 2015 with the delay in announcing a cabinet that many say is a disappointment. Although the ministers were later juggled, the current state of the economy is a testament to their performance.
Nigeria’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) dropped to 3.1 percent at the end of 2022 from 3.4 percent reported in 2021 by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), and, falling in line with the projection of the World Bank, which also noted that it will drop further to 2.9 percent in 2023 and remain at that level in 2024 owing to challenges in the oil and non-oil sectors. The bank also raises concerns that policy uncertainty, sustained high inflation, and rising incidence of violence could temper growth.
