Members of the Senate on Wednesday took turns to condemn the size of the Federal Government’s bureaucracy, saying the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) were overstaffed.
Some of them specifically called for the scrapping of some of the MDAs, which they described as drainpipe on Nigeria’s economy.
The reactions came when the Senate, at the plenary on Wednesday, considered an interim report by its Ad Hoc Committee on Alleged Misuse, Under-Remittance and Other Fraudulent Activities in Collection, Remittance and Expenditure of Internally Generated Revenue by Revenue Generating Agencies.
The panel had in the report said some MDAs were short-staffed.
In his remarks, Senator Tayo Alasoadura said the private sector would need just one-sixth of the government’s current workforce to make better output.
“On Page 26, Item 9, where you said some government agencies are short-staffed, I think that is a statement that cannot hold water in Nigeria. Every organisation in Nigeria is overstaffed. For us to have efficiency, we are just thinking as Nigerians that we should not send people home unnecessarily. He said, I know that those people who have their own businesses will not carry a maximum of one-third of half of the staff to be able to achieve even greater things than what they are achieving,” he stated.
Also, Senator Ben Murray-Bruce said he had gone through the report to examine agencies established by 1960, adding, “These agencies are irrelevant in today’s world.
“The Minister of Finance should look at this agencies. I bet you, half of them can be totally eliminated from the books. The other half can be sold or simply privatised. We can reduce capital budget by 10 per cent.”
According to the lawmaker, revenue generating agencies cost more to keep by the Federal Government than the revenue they generate.
Murray-Bruce said, “I have worked in two of those agencies. When you are appointed chief executive officer of any of these agencies, you are not given any training. You are a political appointee made managing director of an agency, but you are not trained. I don’t know what expectations should be expected of you as the MD or chairman of any of these agencies.
“You may be competent or not; you may be qualified or not, but if you have people appointed politically to run agencies that generate trillions of naira for the economy, then who is to blame? Which is worse: an incompetent person or a person who is a crook?
“For example, the National Orientation Agency came to us for budget defence. We approved N1.5bn for them to pay salaries but not a penny was given to them to do any work. The Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria has 8,000 workers. I cannot blame the director-general for having 8,000 workers, because people are unemployed; but you can run the FRCN with 2,000 workers.”
