Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, says there is no timeline yet for the execution of the Steve Oronsaye’s Report.
He stated this during an interview after an official visit to the headquarters of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) in Abuja.
Gbajabiamila, a former Speaker of the Green Chamber, trashed claims of the report being slowed down.
He said the Federal Government is figuring out all necessary modalities to guarantee a smooth run of the policy when executed.
Gbajabiamila said, “Oronsaye’s Report is being worked upon. Yes, we’ve been talking about this for months now but anything worth doing is worth doing properly.
“It is not as easy as it sounds. A committee has been set up looking at it and I am sure very soon, the final report will be out and implementation will begin.
“I can’t get give an exact timeline but soon…We don’t want to sacrifice thoroughness on the altar of anxiety or anxiousness of getting things done. It will be done soon.”
There were some motions without movement on the 12-year-old report during ex-President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in office, yet the new government said executing the report lined up with its cost-cutting measures.
So, in February, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) chaired by President Bola Tinubu approved the full implementation of the Oronsaye report to merge some parastatals, agencies, and some commissions, while others will be subsumed, scrapped or relocated.
This, as indicated by the government, was in accordance with the need to lessen the cost of administration and streamline productivity across the administration value chain.
To guarantee the execution of the proposed changes, FEC set up an eight-man committee with the mandate to execute the mergers, scrapings, and relocations within 12 weeks.
In any case, six months later, the report has not been executed. Rather, the President in July created a Ministry of Livestock Development from the Agriculture Ministry, a development that has been greeted with blended reactions.
Back in 2011, then President Goodluck Jonathan set up the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies with Oronsaye as chairman.
On April 16, 2012, the committee submitted an 800-page report distinguishing, amongst a few other things, overlapping agencies, causing wastage in expenditure.
The report 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.
