It came as a pleasant surprise to most people when they heard from the Special Adviser to the President on Policy Coordination, Hadiza Usman, while briefing the Villa press corps on Monday, the 26th of March, 2024 that the Federal Executive Council had agreed to dust up the almost forgotten public service reforms recommendations by the Steve Oronsaye Panel on the Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Agencies, Parastatals and Commissions, which was set up by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011 and the Report submitted timeously in 2012.
The Committee’s terms of reference were essentially to “restructure and rationalise” the various bodies comprising the federal government and its mammoth bureaucracy which were considered at that time to be unduly bloated to the extent that it became a massive drain on the nation’s fast declining resources and also constituting an insurmountable clog to government efficiency and effectiveness.
Needless to say today that if indeed the Nigerian government was already over-bloated by 2012, it has today become an albatross and a mammoth obstacle to the fiscal and productive wellbeing of Nigeria. So far, government has become a wayward outlet for dolling out nepotistic and sinecure appointments to people who do not add anything positive to the efficiency and effectiveness of public administration in the country – a colossal wastepipe for draining taxpayers’ money.
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The 800-page Report which was presented to President Goodluck Jonathan by the seven-man Committee, in summary, boldly recommends the scrapping and merging of 220 out of the 541 government agencies in existence then, the aim being to “streamline operations and eliminate redundancies”, a process which was estimated to save Nigeria the pretty sum of N862 billion between 2012 and 2015 alone!
Giving the well-known fact that one of the major reasons why the cost of government in Nigeria is probably one of the highest in the world is the unnecessary duplication of goals and functions across multiple agencies that often end up clogging each other and frustrate smooth government operations. Another major source of waste in our government is the disproportionately large and gluttonous Legislature that draws so much of the nation’s resources in the form of stupendous allowances and “constituency projects” that have no fiscal parallels anywhere in the democratic world.
All these institutional wastages are in addition to the fact that they all feed on the limited resources of the government which means that what should have been deployed to rendering government services to the people in the key areas of health, education, basic infrastructure are being diverted to the payment of unnecessarily bogus salaries and humongous allowances.
It therefore remains a matter of serious concern that President Jonathan who initiated the good idea ended up merely urging its implementation after a White Paper endorsing most of the recommendations failed to bring them into fruition immediately and also why President Muhammadu Buhari, who took over from President Jonathan, after “reviewing” the Report and issued another White Paper also failed to implement it. What was the scare?
As a matter of fact, both the Jonathan and Buhari administrations, contrary to the fundamental principles enunciated in the Oronsaye Report which is the evolution of a leaner and smarter government for the federal government which the other tiers of government in the federation were expected to emulate, actually went further to be recklessly creating more wasteful agencies just for the sake of providing jobs “for the boys” and as political patronage and, in some awful cases, as avenues for nepotistic and patronage-disbursement of lucrative offices to only favored individuals irrespective of their lack of capacity and requisite qualifications to actualize the “lofty” goals of those agencies.
It is, therefore, commendable that the present administration has taken the bull by the horns and decided to reconsider the long-abandoned Report and see how it could be conscientiously implemented by demonstrating the elusive political will in policy implementation. It is also noteworthy that this time around, the government did not just proceed to implement it in the usual impromptu manner without the initial recourse to consultations with all the stakeholders as a matter of responsible governance procedure.
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I would suggest that the members of the Civil Service should be represented on the review Committee because whatever is eventually approved will affect them directly. This is in spite of the assurances so far given by the government that the forthcoming exercise will not adversely affect the employment of workers in those soon-to-be-reformed agencies even though it would necessarily reduce on the number of those high-earning crowds of CEOs, Chairmen and Executive heads of many agencies.
The reality now is that in the intervening 12 years since the Oronsaye’s applauded recommendations, the number of agencies within the federal government has more than doubled. If the Report thought that 561 agencies were too many in 2012, what would it be saying today that we now have more than a thousand government agencies fighting for operational spaces within FCT and elsewhere?
It then means that the new Committee must proceed to study and properly understand the fundamental principles that informed the original recommendations and then proceed to apply them in rationalizing what we have now and in consonant with contemporary realities. Accordingly, if Oronsaye recommended the reduction on the number of agencies in existence then by more than half, this new Committees should not attempt to be reinventing the wheel, it should simply proceed to restrict the size of government agencies to no more than 400 following the well-thought-out Oronsaye’s formula. More importantly, a moratorium should be placed on the National Assembly which takes uninformed pride in creating new and fanciful agencies at each of its sitting. This irresponsible proliferation of agencies by our parliamentarians must stop.
The President would be making the work of the Committee even lighter if he could just set the example of cost-cutting in his government by rationalizing the size of his Cabinet and presidential aides at the earliest possible time because, more than anything else, perception is as powerful as reality. This action is necessary because, as been pointed out elsewhere, there is a difference between the “Price of Government” which is more of the spending profile of the particular administration and the “Costs of Government” which relates more to the structure of the government in place. Both should be considered pari passu if we are to make progress in seeking for leaner governments.
It is remarkable that even before the Committee is formally inaugurated, there are already protests from some quarters who will never accede to the idea of cutting the extremely prohibitive costs of government because they have come to believe that government exists only to cheaply line their private pockets and gluttonously fulfil their peculiar materialistic sense of entitlement to the exclusion of the majority.
Some people have wisely suggested that since Mr. Steve Oronsaye is still alive, the government should directly engage him as an “elderly adviser” to the new implementation Committee and seek his take in whatever areas he personally thinks the Report needs further reworking, giving the benefits of his hindsight because a lot of water must have passed under the bridge since 2012.
Like every reform, President Tinubu should expect petty and self-serving resentments and rabid personal abuses from those who do not wish the nation well. But if he must succeed in his reform mission, he should, like Ceaser’s wife, be above reproach and that would require his avoidance of any allusion to selfishness and overt partisan considerations in the process. Going on international missions with his children in tow, for example, will only complicate the much-needed trust and confidence of an already skeptical public that he means well about cutting costs.
The current size of the Nigerian government must be pruned down drastically if this economy is ever going be able to fulfil the renewed hope of sustainable development as is often espoused by the government after the massive debilitation it has been subjected to over the years through hedonistic governance. If it means cutting costs, starting from the Presidency, through the Legislature and across the entire gamut of government across the various tiers of government down to the local government, so be it!
*Prof Ikhariale is a columnist in the Daily Independent
