The federal government Thursday said it has no plan to disengage civil servants because of the nation’s economic downturn.
Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning Zainab Ahmed stated this while featuring on the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA)’s ‘Good Morning Nigeria’ programme monitored by Blueprint in Abuja.
The minister said President Muhammadu Buhari has always remained an advocate of workers’ welfare and would never mandate a mass disengagement of the nation’s public workforce.
She, however, said the government would reduce overheads by ensuring merger of its agencies.
The minister’s position came against the backdrop of media reports (not in Blueprint) that government was planning to sack workers over cash crunch.
Debunking the reports, the minister said: “Mr President doesn’t want to disengage staff. That is what he has directed from the beginning of his administration. He also directed that we pay salaries. The federal government has never failed in paying salaries and he said we must always pay pensions.
“So, he has been consistent in those directives and we have followed those directives to the letter.”
Hinting on plans to cut down on expenditures in various agencies and ministries, she said this remained the only way to ensure reduced cost of governance.
“Well, we do hope that at the end of the exercise, some agencies will be merged and it will cut down operational costs.
“And also we will be able to come up with incentive packages to retrain people and redeploy them in some areas where they are useful. For example, we still have a very high need for teachers so we can retrain people and send them to teach but also incentive packages to exit. Again, that is also money. If you want people to exit you have to pay them.
“That is an incentive package so that they can go. That is why it is taking a lot of time because it is not easy to decide on this. Everything centres on resources.
“We need resources and if we had a lot of money, we would just give very beautiful incentive packages and people would exit and go and start their businesses and we would reduce the size of the personnel cost,” Ahmed said.
FG’s N10bn to Nigerians
In a related development, the federal government said it pays two million households N5, 000 monthly, the cost of which comes to N10 billion.
Similarly, the government said over 10 million Nigerian pupils benefit from its school feeding programme since the government’s initiative commenced.
National Coordinator National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) Dr Umar Bindr said this at the NSIP annual strategic review meeting Thursday in Abuja.
Bindir said the households were captured under its Conditional Cash Transfer programme.
He said: “We have more than 10 million applicants nationwide. We have successfully managed to onboard two million, and we are consistently paying these households N5, 000 per month. The households have an average number of five to seven people.
“We are feeding an average of 10 million children nationwide. By the end of 2021, there were only two states that were not on boarded, Kwara and Bayelsa. But I’m happy to report that they are now aligned, so we are nationwide.”
On challenges confronting the programme, Bindir said: “The first challenge is that there are people who will try to scuttle the programme. There are reports whereby we see schools that don’t exist actually reported. We drop them from the list.
“There are situations where the number of pupils in schools is being inflated. There are areas where the cooking is not taking place and then we are paying cooks.
“There are areas where the aggregators for the food are aggregating the wrong food and they are short-changing the children.”