Tension has gripped federal civil servants following a move by President Muhammadu Buhari and his party, the All Progressives Congress ( APC) to prune down federal ministries from 28 to 19 as a way of reducing the cost of governance and avoiding wastage of scarce resources.
A number of civil servants who spoke with our correspondents expressed fear that the move might lead to loss of jobs and hardship for the average worker. They are anxious to ascertain if the merger would affect the ministries where they work while the workers’ unions are warming up to resist the policy. A senior official in the Ministry of Mines and Steel development told Saturday Telegraph that there has even a lot of uncertainty since the report hit the ground that their Ministry might be merged with the Ministry of Power and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. He said that given the new thinking that solid minerals would be the next main revenue earner for the country, the proposed merger might become counter- productive.
According to the official, who would not want his name in print, those behind the merger must ensure that the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development was not subsumed in the process and made to take the backstage at the end of the day. Saturday Telegraph also sought the views of some personnel in the Ministry of Aviation and the response was the same.
There was a general panic mood in the parastatals in the aviation sector even as the unions kicked against the proposed merger. “We have heard about the merger but we cannot be sure till it happens. We heard it but it is still a rumor. So, let’s see what will happen but for now it’s rumor. But let me not preempt what is going to happen. “I cannot tell you that these people are going to implement this recommendation because there are disagreements already on the issue. I know that the aviation unions are trying to discourage the government from going ahead with it.
But we cannot categorically say whether it is going to happen or not. Let’s wait and see how it goes,” he said. A few days ago, the Transition Committee which was set up by President Muhammadu Buhari to review the hand-over notes of the previous administration and advise the new government on the way forward submitted it’s report in which it recommended that Buhari should appoint into his cabinet only 19 senior ministers and 17 ministers of state, bringing the total to 36. Although such an arrangement would fulfill the basic constitutional requirement of one minister per state, the implication is that the extra-ministerial portfolios that usually go to the geo-political zones and at the discretion of the President would be absent.
In previous regimes, the President appointed 42 ministers, picking one from each of the six geopolitical zones in addition to one from each of the 36 states of the federation. Under the Jonathan administration, there were 28 senior ministers and 14 ministers of state, a situation that created more financial burden for the administration. Since 1999, the successive administrations have expressed concern over the cost of having a large government and each of them have taken steps to effect changes through streamlining the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), but each time, these changes were reversed due to political calculations and pressures from the labour unions.
No comments:
Post a Comment