The clamour by concerned Nigerians for action on the high cost of governance appears to have finally caught the interest of the Senate, which has started working on relevant laws to reshape the country’s overly bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. Confirming this, Adedayo Adeyeye, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, in a recent report, said, “There is the urgent need to review the Acts (laws) that establish the various agencies of the Federal Government. We have 600 of such agencies.”
This is not only an encouraging development, but also a compelling action that is long overdue. The number involved is just too staggering to ignore. This is why previous administrations had taken an interest in tackling the problem but regrettably lacked the political will to see it through. Earlier accounts had put the number of ministries, departments and agencies of government at 541, but many new ones have since been created in the past few years, bringing the number to over 600. With such a colossal number of agencies, it is not surprising that a huge chunk of revenues generated by the country now goes into the upkeep of public servants.
According to a report by BudgIT, a not-for-profit that tracks public expenditure, the personnel cost at the federal level leapt from N1.8 trillion in 2017 to 2.1 trillion in 2018, taking almost a quarter of the national budget. With the recent increase in wages across the board about to be implemented, it is likely that wages alone might consume about a third of the national budget. Cutting the cost of governance, starting from dealing with the size of the bureaucracy, therefore, becomes inevitable, instead of just hurling taxes at the already impoverished citizens, some of whom are already overtaxed.
The move by the Senate is also apposite as it is coming at a time that the Muhammadu Buhari administration is showing a renewed interest in controlling the size of government. A government official in charge of the Bureau for Public Reforms, Dasuki Arabi, said the President had ordered the Federal Executive Council to take a second and more critical look at the Steve Oronsaye report, which recommended the downsizing of the numerous MDAs that had been guzzling funds that would have been deployed in critical areas of national development.
The Presidential Committee on the Rationalisation and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, now commonly referred to as the Oronsaye Committee, was set up by the Goodluck Jonathan administration to explore the options of reducing the size of government to make it more transparent, efficient and in line with global best practices. The committee, inaugurated in August 2011, submitted its report the following year, calling for the merger, conversion and outright scrapping of many agencies.
Rightly describing the cost of governance in Nigeria as one of the highest in the world, the committee recommended a reduction in the number of statutory agencies from 263 to 161, effectively closing 102 agencies. In fact, the Oronsaye Report should be the reference point for any government desirous of reforming the public service because, in accordance with its terms of reference, it had taken into consideration, reports of similar committees or panels set up in the past for that purpose. In this case, there were the Allison Ayida Report of 1995 and the Ahmed Joda Report of 1999.
Frankly, the rationalisation of the bureaucracy has become inevitable because some of the agencies were set up for ad hoc assignments and were supposed to have wound up at the completion of their assignments; but they did not. There are also those with overlapping and duplicating functions that could either be brought together or scrapped and their functions taken over by other related agencies. Some agencies need to be shrunk and others augmented to function more efficiently. For instance, in the area of security, there are many outfits that seem to be doing the same thing. Where the police and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps are already in existence, there is a bill for the establishment of the Nigerian Peace Corps. Of what use would that be? But efforts are at advanced stages to ensure that it comes into existence.
Since many of these establishments are created by law, the input of the National Assembly is inevitable in bringing about a reform of the bureaucracy. Their enabling laws should be reviewed to determine those that need repeal or amendment. It is also important to warn the lawmakers to stop creating new agencies unless where absolutely necessary. In other well-developed polities, new agencies are not created without guarantees of their funding. But if bills for the creation of new agencies are passed by the National Assembly, it is the duty of the President to withhold assent if such bills fail to comply with all the requirements, including that of funding.
In other societies that value good governance, the creation, scrapping or merging of agencies of government happens from time to time, depending on what the government wants to achieve. For instance, last year, the United States government came up with a proposal to merge the US Department of Education and the US Department of Labour to result in a new department called the Department of Education and the Workforce. This, the Donald Trump Administration said, was part of the plan to shrink the government by eliminating inefficiency and repositioning education to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.
Unlike in the past, both the legislature and the Presidency have to show more commitment this time to making the rationalisation work. This is very important because the extent to which the government goes in managing the cost of governance might as well define the survival and success of Nigeria as a country.
