Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, has stated that there is currently no timeline for the implementation of the Steve Oronsaye Report.
Gbajabiamila made this disclosure on Tuesday during an interview following an official visit to the headquarters of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) in Abuja.
Dismissing claims that the report has been stalled, Gbajabiamila, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, asserted that the federal government is working on the necessary modalities to ensure a smooth implementation of the policy when the time comes.
Despite limited progress during the eight years of former President Muhammadu Buhari's administration, the new government under President Tinubu has expressed its commitment to the report, aligning its implementation with cost-cutting measures.
In February, the Federal Executive Council (FEC), chaired by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, approved the full implementation of the Oronsaye Report. The report proposes merging certain parastatals, agencies, and commissions, while others will be subsumed, scrapped, or relocated.
According to the government, these measures are intended to reduce the cost of governance and enhance efficiency across the governance value chain.
To oversee the proposed changes, the FEC set up an eight-man committee with a mandate to implement the mergers, closures, and relocations within 12 weeks. However, six months have passed since this decision, and the report has yet to be implemented.
Instead, in July, President Tinubu announced the creation of a new Ministry of Livestock Development, carved out of the Ministry of Agriculture, a move that has sparked 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 chairman.
The committee submitted its findings on April 16, 2012, in an 800-page report that identified numerous overlapping agencies causing significant expenditure wastage. The report found that there were 541 parastatals, commissions, and agencies and recommended reducing them to 161, abolishing 38 agencies, and merging 52 others.
Meanwhile, Gbajabiamila also conducted a fact-finding visit to the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) office in Abuja on Tuesday. He began “oversight” visits to various agencies under the Presidency last week, including the National Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA), the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC), and the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI).
These visits are seen as part of efforts by the President’s office to ensure closer monitoring and better coordination of government agencies as the administration continues to prioritize streamlining governance and reducing public spending.
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