Oronsaye Report: Government allays fear of job losses

The Federal Government will not retrench workers in the course of the implementation of the 12-year-old Steve Oronsaye report.

Mohammed Idris, the minister of information and national orientation, confirmed this at a media briefing on Wednesday in Abuja.

“The essence of the implementation of the Oronsaye reports is not to retrench workers, but to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of the agencies, and to also reduce cost.

“There are some aspects of the report that have been reviewed; but those aspects that have to do with merging, scrapping and subsuming have already been undertaken.

“The whole idea is that the government wants to reduce cost and improve service delivery. That does not necessarily mean that the government is out to retrench workers and throw people into the labour market. That is not the original intention of the government.

“The intention is that efficiency has to be brought in, because, some of these agencies are having an overlap in their operations. We are doing this for people to have the benefit of democracy,” Idris said.

The federal executive on Monday approved the implementation of the recommendations of the Oronsaye panel on the restructuring and rationalisation of the Federal Government’s agencies and commissions.

The government said the implementation of the policy would involve the merging, subsuming and scrapping of agencies with similar functions.

On April 16, 2012, the committee submitted an 800-page report identifying, amongst several other things, overlapping agencies, causing wastage in expenditure.

The committee said there were 541 parastatals, commissions and agencies and recommended that 263 of the agencies should be reduced to 161, 38 agencies abolished and 52 merged.

There was some motion without movement on the report during ex-President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year administration but was never implemented.