Federal Government inaugurates boards of NBS, CMD, NISER.

Supervising Minister for National Planning, Amb Bashir Yuguda

The Federal Government on Thursday inaugurated the boards of three parastatals under the National Planning Commission.

The parastatals and their board chairmen are the National Bureau of Statistics under the chairmanship of Amb. Greg Mbadiwe; the Centre for Management Development to be chaired by Prof Tunde Adeniran and the Nigeria Institute for Social and Economic Research chaired by Mr Oladosu Oladipo.

Speaking shortly after the boards were inaugurated in Abuja, the Supervising Minister for National Planning, Amb Bashir Yuguda charged them to discharge their duties in line with the task set before them.

He said owing to the importance of planning and capacity building to the transformation agenda, there is need for the board to come up with practical strategies that would help reposition their respective parastatals.

For instance, he said the federal government had already taken steps to strengthen the NBS to enable it provide timely and accurate statistics for the purpose of economic planning.

He assured the board that the ministry would not, in any way, interfere with their routine operations but assured however of government’s support of an enabling environment for them to achieve their mandate.

He said the members of the board were carefully chosen owing to their experience and capacity to deliver on their mandate.

He said, “These boards are what we categorize as class A boards under the federal government.

“The three boards are great pillars of support for the transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan because when we talk about capacity building, service delivery, them we talk of transformation agenda.

“You have been carefully chosen and we rely on your experience as senior colleagues and you have a duty to perform, you have a task to deliver and we believe you have the capacity to do that.”

Also speaking at the event, the Chairman, House Committee on National Planning, Mr Pethel Amadi charged the members of the board to use their experience in proffering workable solutions to the problems facing the nation.

He said,  “We believe that the role you have to play is very critical in ensuring growth and development for the economy.

“At the House of Representatives  committee on national planning, we are convinced that a lot more space need to be given to the national planning commission and agencies to formulate polices that would affect our national economy.

“We think that the role of national planning has been taken over by those who clearly have tried to be in charge of everything and we at the National Assembly are convinced that this is part of the problem we are experiencing in our economy.”