Oronsaye Report: The Good & The Blues by Odiawa Ai

To lightly put it, there isn't an iota of doubt that the Federal Government is over bloated. A lot of parastatals not only bear about the same nomenclature but basically share similar missions and have not so dis-comparable functions. The degree of duplicity in the aims and objectives of the agencies sometimes makes one wonder, if government is aware of the name and functions of a specific agency, as it creates and christens yet another comparable government body.

The greater part of those agencies were created under democratically elected governments, and the government of the day usually pandered to members of the National Assembly, political parties and other political groups, to acquire political benefit from them. This kept on expanding government’s intermittent consumption. This isn't just in that frame of mind of compensations and wages, but in exceptionally wasteful and corruptive spending, with financial plan of these agencies showing extraordinary redundancy of so many details, over such countless years. The National Assembly once queried a specific agency over spending on the development of a car park that kept recurring for over 6 years.

With an end goal to lessen the cost of governance, a few reform committees have been constituted since the commencement of the 4th Republic, beginning with the Ahmed Joda panel of 1999, under the Obasanjo Administration. In 2011, The President Goodluck Jonathan Administration likewise constituted the Steve Oronsaye Committee on the Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals and Agencies. The Buhari Administration additionally constituted the Amal Pepple Committee to review the Oronsaye report, and to cover the 2012 to 2021 period, which wasn’t under the review of the Oronsaye report. One more Committee was constituted under the Chairmanship of Ebele Okeke, to produce a white paper on both reports. Yet, very much like the White Papers under President OBJ and President Goodluck went unattended to, the Buhari Administration likewise didn't implement the reports, nor the suggestions of the White paper it produced.

Thirteen years later, the President Tinubu Administration is prepared to implement the recommendations of the Steve Oronsaye report, to reduce bureaucratic costs, and it envisages that it will be saving near to 1 trillion Naira from the exercise. The Special Adviser to the President on Policy Co-ordination and Implementation, Hadiza Bala Usman made this declaration on the 26th of February, 2024, after the Federal Executive Council meeting. The President constituted a Committee to execute these reforms, and they have been given a time frame of twelve weeks to execute the mergers of the impacted agencies and institutions. The ICPC and the EFCC will be under one roof as one Anti-corruption agency. BPE would be merged with the Infrastructure Concession and Regulatory Commission, ICRC. National Commission for Museums would be merged with National Gallery of Arts. NACA will be merged with the National Agency for Disease Control. The Oil and Gas sector too will be having a number of regulatory agencies coming together under one roof. In the education sector, Nomadic Education Commission would be merged with the Commission for Mass Literacy and Adult Education. Salaries and Wages Commission is to be merged with the Revenue Mobilization and Fiscal Allocation Commission. Border Communities Development Agency to become under the National Boundaries Commission. NEMA and Refugees Commission to become the National Emergency and Refugees Management Commission. The rundown is extremely exhaustive with the Federal Government having close to six hundred agencies and parastatals.

Reducing cost of governance is what everyone has been requesting, including most civil society organizations. This has been for a really long time. It is presently here. What the President Tinubu Administration is doing will no doubt reduce costs, a trillion or more. In any case, does it suggest massive retrenchments from the civil service? Will thousands of Nigerians loose their jobs? Could it add up to the millions of unemployed Nigerians? Certainly, a bloat in joblessness figures can't be considered as an ever-evolving development. What measures are set up to pad the repercussions of the mergers, on the off chance that a great many government employees are to lose their jobs? We have seen the implementation of the removal of fuel subsidy from government spending but have not seen a relating proactive remedy to the impacts and sufferings that the policy has caused.

I might be off-base, however the mergers will see to a great deal of Nigerians joining the jobless populace. The subsidy removal and the floatation of the naira have significantly affected the populace. Justifiably, they are reformative and necessary. Nonetheless, the citizens are wrestling with the fantastic inflation that is making feeding unaffordable. The Finance Minister has said that only 5% of Nigerians have 500,000 naira in their accounts. Except if I'm off-base about the mergers that are about to take place or already taking place, the percentage as stated by the Finance Minister is going to get a lot of lower. Except if there are systems set up, better than the ones set up for the removal of subsidy, the economics of the populace will undoubtedly be in additional ruins and the uneasiness will perhaps double. We may be heading towards getting everything completely mixed up, as we look for additional reforms from positions that have kept us down as a nation. As the Oronsaye report is being implemented, there ought to be measures set up to pad the impacts of such a reform, that would be affecting thousands, and unintentionally millions of Nigerians. The populace is choking from the two latest reforms as it is. There’s a maxim that says, “putting a broken leg together is painful but considered a necessary pain”. I'm not so sure we are conversant with the pain of trying to ‘repair’ two broken legs simultaneously. One too many reforms simultaneously might be an extreme undertaking and an intense task from Nigerians.