The aim is to cut costs, but there are challenges ahead
Amid dwindling resources and growing expenses, the federal government is falling back on the 2012 report of the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalisation of federal government parastatals, commissions and agencies to reduce the cost of governance. Last Monday, an eight-man implementation committee headed by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), George Akume was given a 12-week deadline to take the necessary administrative and legislative steps for the merging or scrapping of no fewer than 13 identified agencies. But with most of them established by statutes, there are indications from the National Assembly that the exercise may not be smooth sailing. The House of Representatives last Thursday passed a motion which argued that the exercise “will not substantially reduce the cost of governance” and could “throw up unintended consequences, implications and outcomes.”
Established by President Goodluck Jonathan and chaired by a former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Steve Oronsaye (after whom the report was named), the committee proposed a drastic downsizing of the federal bureaucracy that would engender considerable reduction in the cost of governance. But there are questions about whether the administration of President Bola Tinubu is genuinely interested in reducing the cost of governance or it simply wants to use the Oronsaye Report to buy time. This is against the background that the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari also made a song and dance about implementing the Oronsaye Report at the end of which nothing happened. Besides, the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) to which the National Salaries, Income and Wages Commission (NSIWC) is supposed to be merged is a creation of the 1999 constitution. That requires a long amendment process. There are also questions about the personnel and political heads of these agencies. And of course, what happens to the new agencies that were created in the past 12 years after the submission of the Oronsaye Report?
Indeed, only last year, three agencies – Nigeria Data Protection Commission, the Defence Industry Technology, Research and Development Institute, and the National Education Loan Fund which now has a board and an executive secretary, came into being. Besides, before leaving office last year, President Buhari also created three other agencies including the National Social Investment Programme, the National Senior Secondary Education Commission, and the Chartered Institute of Power Engineers of Nigeria. And despite the high cost of governance, the Senate also proposed the establishment of 376 new agencies and institutions.
But while presenting the report in 2013, Oronsaye had highlighted sundry duplication of functions by these agencies. For instance, while acknowledging that the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) has been quite active, the committee observed that what the agency was established to do is indeed a replication of the mandates of two existing bodies, namely: the highway department of the federal ministry of works with respect to the maintenance of safety and orderliness on our highways and the role of the police in ensuring law and order on our roads. Indeed, many of the current ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) are sheer duplication as they perform overlapping functions which often result in needless power tussle and conflict of interest. That accounts for why the cost of maintaining the nation’s bloated bureaucracy is rising every year.
However, successive governments (including the current one) have over the years created a multiplicity of other MDAs without any corresponding improvement in service delivery. Indeed, the only contribution many can be credited with is that they are cost centres through which some unscrupulous officials fleece government funds. While reducing the cost of governance may be in the right direction, the planned implementation of the Oronsaye Report may not achieve that purpose. What we are faced with may therefore be no more than a timewasting distraction that will make no difference at the end of the day.
