THE chief of staff to Nigerian President, Femi Gbajabiamila, has said the implementation of the Oronsaye’s report would not be immediate as promised.
Gbajabiamila stated this on Tuesday, August 27, when he visited the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) headquarters in Abuja.
While debunking claims of the report being abandoned, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, said the federal government was working out all necessary modalities to ensure its smooth implementation.
The report, submitted in 2012 to the federal government by former head of service, Stephen Oronsaye, has been a subject of discussion over the years.
It recommended the reduction of government agencies to streamline operations and reduce the cost of governance.
If implemented, the federal government’s 263 statutory agencies as of 2012 could be reduced to 161, making 102 heads of those agencies lose their jobs.
The report has since caught the attention of the three presidents who have led the nation between 2012 and now. They are former presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Mohammadu Buhari, and the incumbent Tinubu.
Both Jonathan and Buhari had at different times considered its implementation but failed.
Meanwhile, six months after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) chaired by Tinubu approved the full implementation of the report, the government has now said there’s no timeline for its implementation.
This was despite the FEC setting up an eight-man committee with the mandate to implement the mergers, scrapings, and relocations within 12 weeks.
Recall that the President had in July created a Ministry of Livestock Development from the Agriculture Ministry, which further cast doubts on the implementation of the report.
Creating the new ministry will bring the number of federal government ministries to 36.
The ICIR reports that the President formed the biggest-ever cabinet in the country with 48 ministers and dozens of aides who are remunerated with the country’s lean resources.
Running ministries takes a huge toll on Nigeria’s meagre resources, much of which is corruptly diverted into the private purses of public officials, as seen in scores of corruption cases involving former public officeholders in the nation’s courts.
In August 2023, The ICIR reported that paying 45 ministers in Tinubu’s cabinet would gulp N30 million monthly.
In another report, this organisation detailed what the President, his vice, governors, ministers and their aides receive as salaries.
Usman Mustapha is a solution journalist with International Centre for Investigative Reporting. You can easily reach him via: [email protected]. He tweets @UsmanMustapha_M