We must shed the load now
President Bola Tinubu may have too many bullets to bite to change the way we do things, restore some sanity in governance, reduce crass waste in government and make a determined paradigm shift in the expenditure pattern in favour of capital votes. I hope God equipped him with strong teeth.
One bullet that cannot wait for too long for his bite is the insane cost of governance. I refer the president to the lead front page story of TheGuardian newspaper of last Sunday, July 2, in which the newspaper reported on the increasing cost of governance made worse with the non-implementation of the Oronsaye committee report of 2012.
This is not a new problem. But because it lingers, it has gotten worse. Successive federal administrations, headed by men in khaki or agbada, followed the tradition of decrying it in just the same way they reacted to other irritating problems whose solutions do not require rocket science. Federal government shelves bulge with reports of panels of experts that advised successive administrations on what they must do to bring down the cost of governance. They were either ignored by the administrations that set them up or they were treated with the benign cosmetics of nudging rather than upsetting the applecart.
One of such reports refuses to go away. President Goodluck Jonathan, aware that hundreds of government parastatals and agencies were draining the national treasury, decided to do something about it. Perhaps, he was trying to test the bullet with his teeth. In 2011, he set up a presidential committee on restructuring and rationalisation of federal government parastatals, commissions, and agencies. The committee was chaired by Steve Oronsaye, former head of service of the federation. It submitted an 800-page report to the government within eight weeks in 2012. The committee meant business, but the government that birthed it was not so inclined. The Nigerian shuffle began.
The committee found that there were 541 federal government parastatals, commissions, and agencies. It found that 50 of these agencies exist in fact but not in law because they have no enabling laws. Scandalous? The federal government funds 929 MDAs, according to the committee. It does not take a genius to see that the government would eventually buckle under the crushing weight of these agencies, most of which exist merely for the political purposes of finding jobs for the boys and the girls.
The report has been in the public domain since 2014 and it is not difficult to recall that it took the knife to the underbelly of a bloated government. It recommended the reduction of the number of statutory agencies from 262 to 161, the scrapping of 38 agencies, the merger of 52 institutions and the reversion of 14 of them to departments.
A 2014 government white paper on the report showed government ambivalence towards it. For instance, the white paper ignored the recommended merger of EFCC, ICPC and the Code of Conduct Bureau, to end the current duplication of functions. These agencies are doing the same thing – they are anti-corruption agencies by different names. Since there are no categories of corruption, the committee thought, and I agree, that putting them together in a larger and more competent body would serve the country and its citizens better than keeping them as separate agencies with all the bureaucracies attendant to them.
It was for the same reason that the committee recommended that “the NUC, the apex body in tertiary education subsector should subsume NBTE and NCCE to form a new agency to be known as the Tertiary Education Commission.” The report shows the insanity in government.
Boss Mustapha, the then secretary to the federal government under Buhari, inaugurated two committees headed by former heads of service of the federation, Bukar Aji and Amal Pepple. One was “to review the Steve Oronsaye report and its white paper” and the second committee was “to review new agencies created from 2014 to date.”
This was mere motion, not movement on the part of the Buhari administration. Dancing around problems defines our governments. There is some eagerness to make the people believe that their governments at national and sub-national levels exist to solve problems but the governments themselves have a different take on their responsibilities. They avoid problems and the problems fester, and they get worse.
Mustapha pointed this out at the inauguration of the two committees. He said that “… the inability to implement the report of the committee on restructuring and rationalisation of federal government parastatals, agencies and commission is costing the government highly. The cost grows higher, and the situation is further worsened by the fact that new agencies are being created on a daily basis.”
He gave the committees six weeks to turn in their reports which would then be followed with a white paper, in the case of the Aji committee. The shuffle would simply go on with faux movement.
If the Buhari administration created new agencies on a daily basis it should be obvious that it was not intent on implementing the Oronsaye committee report. We do know how many more agencies have been added to the 541 unearthed by the Oronsaye committee. In the Nigerian shuffle, you solve problems by piling them on. The more the merrier? That is the philosophy of the Nigerian shuffle. It is a huge problem for the Nigerian state and the Nigerians.
Our country may try but it cannot move forward in the real sense of the popular phrase with so much baggage. Agencies set up to deal with particular national problems have now become bigger than the problems they were meant to solve. Dealing with them has become a much bigger and more complicated problem. It is, as we say in Agila, like the boil on the head of the tortoise. You lance it, the tortoise dies; and if you do not lance it, it dies.
Can the president bite this bullet? Yes, he can. The Oronsaye committee has mapped it all out for him. He must not waver because as Mustapha correctly pointed out, “the cost (of governance) grows higher.” Nigeria is getting poorer, but the labour wards are teaming with baby Nigerians. Our annual population growth rate is put at more than three per cent. For us it does not rain, it pours.
Our country needs urgent load shedding. The Oronsaye committee has told the government what to do. We must pay attention too to the insane salaries of our federal legislators. We are averse to obeying our laws. It does not make much sense for the Nigerian state to pay so much to a group of men and women in the national assembly to make laws that we will not even bother to obey.
[This was first published on July 9, 2023]