OSTENSIBLY worried by a combination of dwindling revenues and huge overhead costs in running the government, the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), mandated the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission to review the salaries of federal civil servants. He also called for a long-overdue review of the number of federal agencies.
As expected, the Nigeria Labour Congress riposted, “It is almost unthinkable that government would be contemplating to unilaterally slash the salaries of Nigerian workers at this time. The question to ask is, ‘which salary is the government planning to slash?’ It certainly cannot be the meagre national minimum wage of N30,000 which right now cannot even buy a bag of rice!” That, sadly, is the reality. Slashing workers’ salaries is hardly the elephant in the living room. Instead, it is an irrational, unscientific and lazy approach to cutting the cost of governance.
It is unfortunate that it has taken the lethargic Buhari regime six years into its inept rule to consider implementing the recommendations of the 800-page Steve Oronsaye committee report on reducing the cost of governance by reviewing the number of federal Ministries, Departments, and Agencies.
Among other things, the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, set up in 2011 by then President Goodluck Jonathan and chaired by Oronsaye, recommended that some MDAs should be scrapped, others merged, and retooled to become self-funding to free funds for capital projects. Until now, Buhari never saw any need to implement the report, even after a White Paper had been issued in 2014.
But at the recent National Policy Dialogue on Corruption and Cost of Governance in Nigeria organised by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, said the President directed that “… the salaries committee…work together with the Head of Service, and other members of the committee to review the government payrolls in terms of stepping down on cost.” Curiously, the minister could not explain the perennial rise in the cost of governance in the country in recent years. “We still see government expenditure increase to a terrain twice higher than our revenue,” she lamented.
Admittedly, the country is faced with a fiscal crisis accentuated by low revenue earnings, now worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is simplistic to think that this can be obviated merely by slashing workers’ salaries. That is preposterous. Instead, a deeper look into the enablers of the crippling fiscal crisis in Nigeria such as a bloated government and an unproductive civil service should point to the way forward. Without overhauling the entire governance and civil service structure to make them nimble and cost-effective, cutting workers’ salaries, whose value has since been eroded by galloping inflation, is inevitably courting industrial discontent.
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo was spot on in 2020 when he admitted at a webinar themed, ‘Economic stability beyond COVID-19,’ that, “There is no question that we are dealing with a large and expensive government.” However, the helplessness he evinced that “given the current constitutional structure, those who would have to vote to reduce (the size of) government, especially to become part-time legislators, are the very legislators themselves,” is disconcerting. What is lacking is the political will to do the needful; pure and simple.
Contrary to Osinbajo’s claim, it does not require any constitutional effort to sell off the country’s four loss-making refineries, which add huge financial burden on the government. The audited accounts of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation in 2020 indicated that three of the refineries recorded N1.64 trillion in cumulative losses in their operations since 2014. Instead of yielding to expert counsel, the statist Buhari regime last March outrageously approved another $1.5 billion for the rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt Refinery alone. That is not how a government genuinely committed to cost-reduction operates.
The Oronsaye committee report offered a way out which the Buhari regime characteristically snubbed until late in the day. It is still not too late to fully implement some of its recommendations. There are so many dead woods who add no value of any kind in the federal civil service yet drain the government of huge revenue. Buhari should muster the political will to shove them aside through strategic harmonisation of agencies and practical administrative reforms, instead of creating new agencies and multiple institutions of higher learning with little resources to run them.
If the government is genuinely keen in cutting cost, it should reduce the money-guzzling Presidential Air Fleet mainly used for base pastimes. An investigation by The Cable indicated the country budgeted N73.3 billion for PAF between 2011 and 2020. This should stop.
Again, Buhari should look inwards. He presides over a bloated cabinet that should be trimmed. It is absurd that while the United States with 50 states, a population of 331 million and GDP of $21.43 trillion (2019), has a cabinet made up of the President, Vice-President and 15 heads of departments (equivalent of ministers), Nigeria, with an estimated population of 206 million and $448 billion GDP (2019), has a riotous cabinet of 44 ministers, featuring mostly round pegs in square holes and innumerable MDAs. Besides, the remuneration of the federal lawmakers believed to be higher than those of the US should be trimmed to reflect the current economic realities. A former senator, Shehu Sani, once revealed “the running cost of a senator is N13.5 million every month.” This is outrageous.
Other measures like reduction in the number of vehicles in the official convoys of political office holders, aides and travel estacodes should be implemented without further delay. There is a need for more prudence in financial management. BudgIT, a finance transparency advocacy NGO, discovered over 316 duplicated capital projects worth N39.5 billion in the 2021 national budget alone. The world’s poverty capital should not be running arguably the world’s most expensive and frivolous democracy.
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