As it is to be expected, the Oronsaye Report is back in the news. And this should not be surprising. Any genuine attempt at engaging with the Nigerian predicament must be a no-hold-barred engagement with the significant issues that lie behind Nigeria’s inability to make substantive progress since independence. And one such issue is the cost of governance matter that has ensure that enormous amount of budgetary monies is spent on administrative wastage and redundancies. And out of all the genuine attempts that have been generated to sincerely combat and arrest Nigeria’s drift further into underdevelopment, one of the unarguably fundamental is the Report of the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies aka the Stephen Oronsaye Report.
Nigeria’s governance system is one of the most expensive in the world. And the simple implication of this is that by the time recurrent expenditure has eaten a large chunk of the budget, there is barely little left for capital and infrastructural projects that are required to make life easy for Nigerians. To understand the significance of the Oronsaye Report requires situating it within the historical trajectory of how Nigeria came to the burden of costly governance structure. The 1970s, specifically after the tragic Civil War, was a period that saw a process of institutional multiplication in administrative responsibilities. This was indeed a period of national optimism based on several issues. The war had just been concluded. Crude oil had been discovered and was bringing in enormous amount of money. The development planning had entered into its second phase with some measure of successes. Yet, there was no adequate attention paid to how these same factors could facilitate administrative complacence.
By the time the Second National Development Plan (1970-1975) would take off, it was undergirded by the economic philosophy that placed the federal government at the commanding height of the economy within the then reigning paradigm of Keynesianism. This was already necessitated by the unitary framework that had been imposed on the Nigerian 1963 Constitution by the Ironsi administration. And then the immense revenue from oil left the federal government awash in petrodollar. Finally, the urgency of achieving national integration demands that the administrative machineries of government must be infused with a national dynamic that will lay the foundation of national unity. This instigated the need to expand the federal public service, without any similar thoughts given to its management and evaluation in terms of governance dynamics. In the final analysis, and under the sway of the principle of representativeness, the civil service bloated beyond any possibility of administrative efficiency. And it gradually began to lose the capacity for internal critical assessment.
It became inevitable, under the rush for recruitment not matched by diligent due process in human resource management, that the first dynamic to diminish is the internal establishment control mechanism that was one of the colonial administrative legacies that made the public service a fundamental inheritance for the nascent Nigerian state. This internal administrative mechanism was built around the control tool nexus of organization and method (O&M) and the treasury control of establishment that benchmark the ratio of capital and recurrent budget. The core elements of this controls were the manpower forecasting and planning system of identifying, planning and acting upon human resource requirements and problems related to the conceptualization of the role of the state in the running of the national economy, as well as the trend analysis of service’s growth in size and expansion of the scope of responsibilities.
Once the internal administrative mechanism became vitiated, the domino effect of administrative decline became inevitable. And so many administrative functions and processes became irretrievably routine that systematically broke down the internal mechanism of efficiency. These include: the systematic planning for short and long-term needs; forecasting of retirement; attrition rates; anticipated vacancies founded on periodic functional reviews (to determine changes in tasks as a result of government’s new policy targets and programme emphases); structural changes and quantum of workload incidental; basic restructuring due to privatization of government concerns; outsourcing (monetization policy as for example); periodic personnel and process audits; review of the scheme of service; abolition of vacant posts; control of the creation of new post, units, departments and agencies; accounting for voluntary retirements, retrenchments, and staff reduction due to process reengineering; automation and system changes; etc.
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The second dimension of the cost of governance predicament the Nigerian state was confronted with derives from creating ad hoc task force structures and units of government business parallel to the existing bureaucratic structures in order to operate what is regarded as a flexible administrative arrangement unencumbered by administrative codes, rules and regulations, and with the capacity to enjoy self-accounting status in terms of resources deployed for their use. And this is further compounded by the replication of these parallel structures across each state of the federation as field offices as concession to our equally dysfunctional federalism. It takes little reflection to see how the ease of dumping the staff strength of these ad hoc arrangements on the mainstream public service leads to the needless expansion in an institutional context whose internal control mechanism has broken down. The implication of these ad hoc parallel structures is the essential lack of any scientific frameworks and parameters for determining not only the establishment of new agencies, commissions and structures, but also their viability and efficacy vis-à-vis existing governance objectives and dynamics, and cost-sensitive policy to wind them up when they have achieved the objectives of their establishment.
And these parallel structures, units and agencies are staffed not with an attention to the aggregate requirements of the federal civil service or its bloated-ness or otherwise, but based on an arbitrary departmental and ministerial staffing dynamics that dumps lots of deadwoods onto the system. This is further complicated by the practice by the politicians of making the civil service a dumping ground for settling their political cronies, party supporters and ethnic base. And finally, once these workers are recruited, outside of all known meritocratic principles and human resource management dynamics, they begin a gradual but steady rise within a system that is pathologically bureaucratic in the sense of rewarding extra-administrative, rather than efficient and performance-rooted, practices. And they are backed by a highly unionized career system that locks the government perpetually into an adversarial industrial relation which not only capitalizes on government’s clueless governance protocols, but also undermine any attempts at genuine administrative move that are conducive to national development trajectory.
Enters the Oronsaye Report…
When the Presidential Committee, headed by Mr. Stephen Oronsaye, was constituted on 8 August, 2011, it was clear that government itself was aware of the terrible drain that the cost of governance issue was having on the national development dynamics of the Nigerian state which had been a subject of strident advocacy for decades. The Jonathan administration that set up the Presidential Committee was responding both to the escalation of cost occasioned by the many redundant ad hoc structures of government and the urgent need to achieve governance accountability that will lead to efficiency in the conduct of government business. And efficiency can only be achieved if the Ministries, Departments and Agencies were repositioned to achieve “more for less;” and to “achieve more with less resources”.
In carrying out its business, the Committee was guided by five fundamental principles:
(a) the economic challenges and the need for Government to make more efficient use of its resources to achieve its development objectives and goals; (b) the fact that Nigeria had undertaken reforms in the past and lessons were learnt; (c) it was imperative to reform to meet the challenges of a better socio-political and economic society ; (d) there was no need to create another body to perform the functions of an already existing statutory entity; the fact that an institution was inefficient and ineffective should not warrant the creation of a new one; and (e) the reform would ensure efficient and effective management of Government structures and functionaries to guarantee better service delivery and good governance.
In summary, the Oronsaye Report establishes as follows: (i) that there are 541 Federal Government parastatals, commissions and agencies (statutory and non-statutory); (ii) 263 of the statutory agencies should be reduced to 161; 38 agencies should be abolished; (iii) 52 agencies should be merged; and (iv) 14 should revert back to departments in ministries. After the Presidential Committee submitted its report, the government in turn set up a White Paper Drafting Committee, headed by Mr. Mohammed Bello Adoke, SAN, the Honourable Attorney-General of the Federation, to study the recommendations of the Oronsaye Committee and to produce a White Paper on the Report. When the White Paper was submitted, as was to be expected, the Government on its part accepted only very few of the recommendations, with a larger number rejected and noted.
The findings of the White Paper, when it was finally released for the public in 2014, was greeted by mixed reactions from Nigerians. And most importantly, it was released to a host of national circumstances that proved inauspicious to its implementation. First, 2014 was just a year away from an election year, and it would be pure political suicide for the government of the day to implement a report that would become a liability for its desire for electoral victory.
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