Is Oronsaye’s report implementable?

“The President has approved that this administration should implement the Oransanye report. It has reviewed the whole of the size of government and has made very significant recommendations in terms of reducing the number of agencies and that would mean merging some agencies”

–Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, on Channels TV on April 30, 2020.

Since the news broke on the plan by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to implement the Steve Oronsaye’s presidential committee report on restructuring and rationalisation of Federal Government parastatals, commissions and agencies, heated arguments have ensued on the desirability or otherwise of the proposal. My position on the matter is that the directive may be diversionary and may amount to wasting of precious time to achieve little results. Indeed, there are serious issues with the implementation of the report and it may well be better for the Buhari regime to actually set up a new committee to achieve better results.

Before coming to the major challenges the implementation of the report will generate, a little background information is necessary to enable people have a holistic understanding of what the committee recommended and the motive behind the recommendations.

On Monday, April 16, 2012, the report of the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Agencies, Commissions and Parastatals headed by Mr. Stephen Oronsaye, who was a former Head of Civil Service, was submitted to President Goodluck Jonathan.  The committee which was inaugurated on August 18, 2011 was mandated to: study and review all previous reports on a similar exercise; examine the enabling Acts of all the MDAs and classify them into various sectors; examine critically their mandates and make appropriate recommendations to either restructure, merge or scrap; and, advise on any other matters, which may be relevant to the desire of government to prune the cost of governance.

While summarising his 800-page report, the committee noted that: “It is a fundamental breach of acceptable practice of good public sector governance to create a new agency or institution as a response to the seeming failure or poor performance of an existing agency in order to suit political or individual interests.  Such a practice, it said, has proved eventually to precipitate systemic conflicts, crises and even collapse at a substantial but avoidably high financial cost to government.” The presidential committee noted further that, “The long-standing challenges that beset the Nigerian public sector, including the parastatals, have created a ‘single story’ of inefficiency, corruption, poor work environment, low morale, ineffectiveness, deceit and low productivity, thereby establishing a perception of a dysfunctional and unproductive public sector…where it is unable to perform its legitimate functions creditably.”

The committee proffered four ways to immediately tackle the high cost of governance. These include: “Reduction in the number and size of the governing boards of parastatals; Linking the budgetary system to deliverables and output; Implementation or vacation of some decisions taken on past reports; and Removal of all professional bodies/councils from the national budget.” The committee established that as of then, there were 541 government parastatals, commissions and agencies (statutory and non-statutory). 263 of these were statutory agencies which it recommended reduced to 161. To achieve this, the committee proposed the abolition of 38 agencies, merger of 52 and reversion of 14 to departments in ministries. The rationale being that there were “duplications and overlaps in the mandates of many parastatals and agencies…without regard to existing laws and, in some cases, out-rightly replicating extant laws.”

In the committee’s opinion, if its report were adopted and agencies reduced in accordance with the recommendations, the government would have saved over N862bn between 2012 and 2015. The breakdown showed that about N124.8bn would be reduced from agencies proposed for abolition; about N100.6bn from agencies proposed for mergers; about N6.6bn from professional bodies; N489.9bn from universities; N50.9bn from polytechnics; N32.3bn from colleges of education and N616m from boards of federal medical centres.

After the committee submitted its report, President Jonathan, the same day, constituted a 10-member White Paper committee headed by his then Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Bello Adoke, who decided to “kill” the report in view. How do I mean? The review committee sat on the report for another two years and only submitted its report in March 2014. When it did, about 90 per cent of the committee’s recommendations were rejected or noted for future considerations. The question is, now that the President has ordered the implementation of the report, is it worth the effort to implement the carcass of the report as enunciated in the White Paper or is there going to be another White Paper? Also, wanting to implement six-year-old recommendations may be problematic as there have been many changes in the form and size of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies.

I learnt the country now has 606 MDAs up from 541 as of the time Oronsaye’s committee wrote its report. Whether we’re talking of the 2012 report or the 2014 White Paper from it, both of them are dated and may not have captured current realities. Even the 10 per cent recommended for implementation may be trailed by controversies.

Apart from that, experience has shown that merger of MDAs may either be counterproductive or ineffective. For instance, in 2015, Buhari reduced federal ministries to 25 while scrapping Ministries of Aviation, Police Affairs, Land and Housing and Culture and Tourism. This was initially applauded as being a step in the right direction. However, the move was counterproductive as many civil servants complained that the merged ministries such as Power, Works and Housing were largely ineffective. Indeed, the President, who in 2015 decided to have 36 Ministers, turned around in 2019 to have a 43-member cabinet, including himself as the Minister of Petroleum Resources.

With this presidential order for the implementation of the report, there will be a lot of pushbacks from the MDAs that will be affected and political considerations may render the whole exercise futile. Already, the organised labour has threatened that any job loss will be vehemently resisted while scrapping of some of the MDAs may necessitate rigorous task of liquidation and amendment of enabling Acts of Parliament.

In my considered opinion, what could be done to reduce the cost of governance is not limited to the merger and acquisition of the MDAs but actual blockage of leakages in the financial system. Corruption is the bane of Nigeria’s development. It is heartwarming that the Federal Government has been able to save a whopping N361bn by deploying the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information Systems according to the Accountant General of the Federation. Strengthening of the anti-corruption agencies and the use of technology to fight corruption will be more effective in reducing corruption and cost of governance. Nonetheless, I await the effect of the implementation order on the report.