Nigeria Country Director, Development Alternative Incorporated (DAI), Dr. Joe Abah discussed the implementation of the Oronsaye Report by President Bola Tinubu during a live appearance on News Central TV’s Jasiri on Tuesday, February 27, 2024.
Abah clarified that only a subset of the recommendations outlined in the report had been implemented.
“This is not the full implementation of the Oronsaye Report. The Report has four main recommendations. It talked about agencies that should be scrapped, those to be merged, and those that should no longer be funded, one of which is a state-owned television that costs about 7 billion a year.
“There were also several agencies it recommended that we should look at their board structure to make the governors more robust.
“So yes, this is a subset implementation of some of the things that were recommended, although it’s a start,” he explained.
The former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, who was Secretary of the Oronsaye Implementation Committee under former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, noted that the committee dealt with numerous appeals, but limited progress was made.
He acknowledged that the Report was reviewed over the years to make it relevant to the changing times.
“The terms of reference for the Oronsaye committee was to look at ways to reduce the cost of governance, remove duplication in functions, and enumerate the number of agencies that the government had. I believe that at the time, we enumerated about 541 agencies. The number has since tripled. Since 2012.
“There have been several reviews of the Report to bring it up to date. I oversaw two of such reviews when I was DG, and since I left about 6 years ago, it has been reviewed at least another three times to bring it up to speed,” Dr. Abah added.
Regarding expectations, Abah advised citizens to manage their expectations while maintaining optimism that the planned reforms would yield positive results.
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