Much Ado about Oronsaye Report

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n Monday, the federal government announced its preparedness to implement the Steve Oronsaye Report of 2012 and the subsequent 2014 White Paper by the Mohammed Bello Adoke inter-ministerial committee. President Bola Tinubu, we have been told, has given the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) a 12-week implementation timeline. “Many agencies will be scrapped, and many others will be merged, to pave the way to a leaner government,” according to presidential spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), following Monday’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting. The specific agencies to be merged or scrapped have also been highlighted so the weeks ahead are bound to be interesting in that regard.

Considering that I have written several columns on the Oronsaye Report, I crave the indulgence of readers to share a few excerpts from the first one, ‘Public Service in Private interest’, published on 7th February 2013, before I conclude with my take on the current issue.

.. anybody who has read the report of the Presidential Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalisation of the Federal Government Paratastals, Commissions and Agencies cannot but understand the waste we call government in Nigeria. Chaired by former Head of Service, Mr Steve Oronsaye, the committee, established in August 2011, submitted its report in April 2012. And it has come out with damning revelations. The executive summary highlights some of the salient rot in the identified 541 federal government agencies, 50 of which have no enabling laws! There are also 55 agencies that are in the statutes book yet not under the supervision of any ministry and some of them include: National Agency for Population Programmes and Development; Population Activities Fund; Population Fund Activities Agency and Population Research Fund!

According to the report, one common feature of virtually all the parastatals is the prevalence of high personnel cost as “many of them receive more budgetary allocations for personnel than they require because that component of their budget is usually inflated”. Several of them are also “obvious duplications of existing bodies” which then underscores the fact of “overlaps and enormous wastage of scarce resources”. To compound the situation, “successive administrations have over the years created parastatals which were not necessarily based on requisite need assessment that would drive development agenda”.

NOTE: Concluded online