Abuja- The Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR), Mr Joe Abah, said on Thursday that some agencies recommended for scrapping would not be given any budgetary allocation this year.
Abah made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
He said that the stoppage was in accordance with the White Paper published by the Stephen Oronsaye-led Presidential Committee on the Rationalisation and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies.
He said that the bureau has ensured that the organisations pencilled for scrapping did not appear in the 2015 budget, pending when the law establishing them would be abrogated.
“We have made sure that those organisations that have been slated for abolition do not appear in the 2015 budget regardless of whenever the law is changed.
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“On some of them, we need to go to the National Assembly to change the law, pending that, we have facilitated the stoppage of their funding in the 2015 budget; this effort is to save government some money”.
On reforms in the service, Abah said that the bureau had updated and refreshed the National Strategy for public service reforms to guide the service from now to year 2025.
The director-general that the bureau had developed a compendium of all reforms introduced from 1999 to 2014, to determine the ones working and those that were functional.
“We have done an analysis of what have been working and what have not been working in the last 15 years we need to tackle those ones that have not been working.
“We have developed a new curriculum for training Human Resource Management in the Federal Civil Service and that have been handed over to the Head of Service who is responsible for the implementation of that policy”.
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He said the major challenges facing the bureau included the cynicism of many Nigerians who believe that nothing would ever work again and the lack of adequate funding.
He said that the bureau had just concluded a National Perception Survey with the Bureau of Statistics, where 13,000 Nigerians from every state in the country where interviewed on their opinion on government reforms.
“We just concluded a national perception survey with the National Bureau of Statistics, where we went to ask 13,000 Nigerians from every state in the country, including Borno and Yobe, what they feel about the reforms that the government has put in place.
“As part of that survey, we asked Nigerians what we should be doing differently and many of them gave us recommendation for this year 2015.
“ We will be working with some of the recommendations that people have given to us.”
The director-general said that that in terms of strategic communication, the bureau would do more work to sensitise Nigerians on the activities of the government and ensure that Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs) functioned better.
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“We want to focus more on agencies because a lot of agencies are more powerful than their ministries and that is not right, because ministries have the policy regulation functions.
“Agencies are the ones that are closest to the people and they are the ones that spend the money, so we need to make sure that agencies work.
He said guidance on ways to run agencies properly would be released soon adding, that assessment platform would be provided. (NAN)
