Vice President Yemi Osinbajo says federal legislators might be unwilling to run part-time as part of efforts to reduce the cost of governance.
Speaking on Friday during a webinar organised by the Emmanuel Chapel, themed, ‘Economic stability beyond COVID-19’, Prof Osinbajo said Nigeria needs a national debate to examine the issues around the size and cost of governance, which has often been described as expensive and unsustainable.
The vice president made the statement while answering questions from a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Lamido Sanusi.
The former CBN governor and immediate past emir of Kano had on June 12 said Nigeria’s governance structure is set up for bankruptcy.
On what the current administration was doing differently to address it, Osinbajo said: “There is no question that we are dealing with large and expensive government, but as you know, given the current constitutional structure, those who would have to vote to reduce (the size of) government, especially to become part-time legislators, are the very legislators themselves. So, you can imagine that we may not get very much traction if they are asked to vote themselves, as it were, out of their current relatively decent circumstances.
“So, I think there is a need for a national debate on this question and there is a need for us to ensure that we are not wasting the kind of resources that we ought to use for development on overheads. At the moment, our overheads are almost 70 per cent of revenues, so there is no question at all that we must reduce the size of government.
“Part of what you would see in the Economic Sustainability Plan also and several of the other initiatives is trying to go, to some extent, to what was recommended in the (Steve) Oransaye Report, to collapse a few of the agencies to become a bit more efficient and make government much more efficient with whatever it has.”
