President Bola Tinubu has approved the full implementation of the Stephen Oronsaye Panel report to merge some parastatals, agencies, and some commissions, while others will be subsumed, scrapped or relocated.
President Tinubu gave the approval on Monday, February 26 during a Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting he chaired at the State House in Abuja.
According to the Special Adviser to Tinubu on Policy Coordination, Hadiza Bala Usman, the development is in line with the need to reduce the cost of governance and streamline efficiency across the governance value chain.
To ensure the implementation of the proposed changes, FEC set up a committee with the mandate to implement the mergers, scrapings, and relocations within 12 weeks.
Tinubu also received a report from the inter-ministerial panel set up to review the affairs of the National Social Investment Programme.
Recall that In 2011, then-President Goodluck Jonathan set up the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies with Oronsaye as chairman.
On April 16, 2012, the committee submitted an 800-page report identifying, amongst several 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.
There were some motions without movement on the report during ex-President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in office but the new government said implementing the report aligned with its cost-cutting measures.
