The role of the National Productivity Centre (NPC) in the development and growth of the productive sector of Nigeria’s economy cannot be overemphasised. NPC was established as a multi-disciplinary, tripartite, research oriented parastatal under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity. It’s mandated to articulate sustainable and result oriented policies that will stimulate and promote the productivity of the whole sectors of the Nigerian economy, so as to generate visible improvements in the quantity and quality of goods and services with the aim of improving the standard of living of the citizenry.
Spurred to achieve its mandate, NPC Director-General, Kashim Yunusa Akor, recently rolled out its strategic plans for the year 2021-2015. This is indeed a major step in the right direction whose importance is incontestable. Over the years, many agencies of government have rolled out strategic plans which many see as a ritual as their intent is never realised. The basic need for a strategic plan for an agency like the NPC is to track its strategic progress over a certain period of time and for the purpose of outlining where the leadership wants the centre to be in the near future. This, the director-general has done pragmatically and systematically. This time around the plans are short on rhetorics and full of achievable goals, which is a radical departure from the past where strategic plans are seen as mere five-year ritual by agencies in Nigeria.
NPC director-general must be commended as the chief visioner of the centre for rolling out this powerful but achievable strategic plans.The NPC’s new strategic plan ays out their goals, prioritises and repositions the centre to accomplish its goals. The plan identifies how those goals and priorities can be achieved and specifies how progress will be measured..
The era when the NPC does not take full advantage of its strategic planning processes and ends up wasting resources to formulate plans that go unused is gone forever, according to the director-general. This is highly commendable because it is really what the system needs to raise Nigeria’s productivity level. There is an old joke that the dustiest book on any manager’s bookshelf is the strategic plan because it is only touched twice in Nigeria – when it is put on the shelf and when it is replace with another. The DG has said this would never be the case.. We commend the director-general for the timely release of this strategic plan for the NPC. We advise that it’s implementation will be pragmatic in order to achieve its objective. With this plan as a roadmap to higher productivity, we are assured that it is a new dawn for Nigeria.Musa Wada,Abuja[email protected]
