By Theophilus Ilevbare
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President
Goodluck Jonathan
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In spite of repeated assurance
from the government to appropriately down size its unwieldy workforce and cost
of governance, most Nigerians doubt the commitment of the government to fully
implement the recommendations of the Presidential Committee on Rationalisation and Restructuring of
Federal Government parastatals, commissions and agencies headed by Steve
Oronsaye.
The
committee recommended the scrapping of 102 statutory agencies from the current
263, abolition of 38 agencies, merger of 52 and reversion of 14 to departments
in the ministries. The 800-page report also recommended the discontinuation of
government funding of professional bodies and councils.
The high cost of servicing the
public sector is antithetical to economic growth. As the Governor of the
Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, rightly pointed out, the civil service is
over-staffed. There is an alarming 45, 000 ghost workers in 251 MDAs. In no
small measure, the civil service has contributed to the culture of corruption,
cronyism and foot-dragging.
From
time immemorial, recommendations and solutions to Nigeria’s myriad of problems
have never been in short supply; it is the political will to implement
that has been the bane. As far back as 1975, government restructured the
Federal Civil Service with a massive purge. In 1984, under the then head of state, Muhammadu
Buhari’s administration, another 3,000 civil servants were sacked for laziness,
idleness, lack of initiative, lateness to office, absenteeism and inefficiency.
A Presidential Advisory
Committee (PAC) chaired by T.Y Danjuma, which had in January 2011, called for
“a more effective and optimal use of national resources,” advised the
government to restructure and rationalise to eliminate waste. Earlier, in 2000,
there was the Ahmed Joda Panel White Paper on the Review, Harmonisation and
Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals which was not implemented
until the Oronsaye committee was set up in 2012.
By summoning the political will
to implement the Oronsaye report, the FG will spare successive governments the
waste of resources and time in setting up similar committees. If the government of the day is serious about the planned
restructuring, it knows exactly what to do to prune the cost of the civil
service without constituting any committee.
Perhaps,
government can start from its duplicity of committee functions when it
constituted a committee led by the Minister for Justice and AGF, Mr Adoke, to
review the work of another headed by Oronsaye. A third committee was set up by
President Jonathan to review the public sector reform, headed by Ahmed
Fika.
Maybe
we now await the constitution of an
implementation committee to fast track the execution of Oronsaye’s report. This
is a duplicity that the committee itself was set up to ratify. After
all, from the government’s antecedents, there is a probability, that the work of the three committees might be
left in the cupboard to gather dust.
In the mean time, palpable fear has pervaded UTME, NECO, EFCC, ICPC
and other agencies under the sledge hammer of rationalisation. But there are
clandestine moves to stymie the implementation of the report by those who
benefit from the bloated bureaucracy that allow about one percent of the
population enjoy allowances estimated at N1.031 trillion representing 35% of
the N4.926 trillion been the total budget of the federal government in the 2013
budget.
Expressing its displeasure with
this data, the Fika committee report said, “It is certainly not morally
defensible from the perspective of social justice or any known moral criterion,
that such a huge sum of public funds is consumed by an infinitesimal fraction
of the people.”
Mallam Nasir
Elrufai, former Minister of FCT, in an essay “Why the cost of government is
unsustainable in Nigeria”, said “It costs nearly 2.5 million naira on the
average annually for the upkeep of each of the federal government’s nearly one
million public sector workers – in the police, civil service, military and
para-military services and teachers in government schools and
institutions.
That is why we
should ask questions when ministries are created and more ministers are
screened by the Senate and sworn in! Each one costs billions!” The implication
is that our entire oil earnings for the year cannot pay the salaries and
allowances of politicians, public sector workers and their overheads.
Recently, the
overlapping functions and battle for supremacy between government agencies was
brought to the fore in the shooting of two Nigeria Security and Civil Defence
Corps, NSCDC, officials by men of the Police Force which ignited a war of
words. It took the intervention of President Goodluck Jonathan to bring the
situation under control.
This particular
incident highlighted the conflict and acrimony that has always existed between
agencies with overlapping functions. The two paramilitary outfits have
been embroiled in an age-long mutual mistrust, over what the officers of the
Nigeria Police often tout as the NSCDC’s intrusion into its statutory roles.
“It is a fundamental breach of
good public sector governance to create a new agency or institution as a result
of the failure or poor performance of an existing agency in order to suit
political or individual interests. That such practices have been
precipitating systemic conflicts, crises and collapse at a substantial but
avoidably high cost to the government cannot be contested,” the Oronsaye
reported said.
The scope of the Oronsaye
committee should have been expanded to federal ministries. The duplicity
extends to one office for ministers and another for ministers of state. Like
deputy governors, it seems the constitution does not have clearly defined role
for these ministers of state.
And how about their numerous
Special Advisers? Ministries with overlapping functions such as the ministry of
petroleum and that of solid mineral resources should be merged. The merged
ministry can aptly be renamed ministry of petroleum and solid mineral
resources.
There is no reason why there
should be separate ministries for information and communication. Can we safely
conclude that since we now have a Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs which birthed
after amnesty was granted to Niger Delta militants that the federal government
will create another for North affairs if amnesty is eventually granted to the
dreaded Boko Haram terrorists?
How has the Ministry for Police
Affairs since its inception improved the workings of the Nigeria Police Force?
How does an inefficient and corrupt police force necessitate the formation of a
ministry at the federal level? You would have observed too that we hardly hear
of more than fifty percent of the ministers or ministers of state in cabinet
for the better part of four years of an administration.
But a handful of agencies
should be left to function separately. The EFCC and ICPC for instance. Both
should be repositioned and made independent of government. Merging them with
the Police Force will further weaken the fight against corruption.
After all said
and done, it can never be over-emphasized that the Nigerian public
sector needs to be re-engineered. The endemic corruption in the sector must be
fought with renewed determination and vigour, which should start from the
restructuring and rationalisation of agencies and parastatals.
Their
proliferation, motivated by selfish interest, to near redundancy are
concomitant effects of sleaze. Until the corruption in the system is
tackled, we might just be moving in circles.
theophilus@ilevbare.com
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