Femi Gbajabiamila, Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, has clarified that there is currently no set timeline for implementing the recommendations from Steve Oronsaye’s report.
He made this statement on Tuesday following a visit to the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) headquarters in Abuja.
Gbajabiamila, who previously served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, dismissed rumors that the report’s implementation was being deliberately delayed. He emphasized that the federal government is working on necessary frameworks to ensure the policy’s effective execution once it begins.
The Oronsaye report, which has been pending for over a decade, saw little progress during former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
However, President Tinubu’s administration has expressed its commitment to the report, aligning it with broader cost-cutting initiatives. In February, the Federal Executive Council (FEC), led by President Tinubu, approved the report’s full implementation.
The plan involves merging, subsuming, scrapping, or relocating various parastatals, agencies, and commissions to streamline government operations and cut costs.
To oversee the implementation, the FEC established an eight-member committee tasked with executing these changes within 12 weeks.
However, six months on, the report’s recommendations have yet to be acted upon. Instead, President Tinubu created a Ministry of Livestock Development, carved out from the Ministry of Agriculture, a decision that has generated mixed reactions.
The Oronsaye report dates back to 2011 when then-President Goodluck Jonathan established the Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions, and Agencies, with Steve Oronsaye as chair.
The committee submitted its findings in April 2012, presenting an 800-page document that identified overlapping government bodies contributing to inefficiencies and wasteful spending. The report recommended reducing the number of agencies from 541 to 161, abolishing 38 agencies, and merging 52 others.
On the same day as his comments on the Oronsaye report, Gbajabiamila also conducted a fact-finding visit to the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) in Abuja, highlighting the administration’s focus on governance and financial reforms.
