MDAs incurred N241.95bn on five overhead expenditure items in 2014, says FG

BPSR Lists Prohibited Items To Save Costs In Governance

As measures put in place by government to restructure the economy continue to bite harder, the Federal Government yesterday described the colossal waste of N241.95 billion on five overhead expenditure items by Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs) in 2014 alone as unacceptable.

A breakdown of the items indicates that travels (local and international) cost government N69.42 billion, welfare N49.71 billion, office stationary and computer consumables N44.43 billion, maintenance (all fixed assets) N43.20 billion and training (local and international) NN35.19 billion respectively

While speaking at the Lunch Time Reforms Seminar Series on ‘Efficiency in Conduct of Government Business’ in Abuja yesterday, Head, Efficiency Unit, Federal Ministry of Finance, Patricia Oniha, said, for growth and development, in form of job creation, diversification of the economy, improved quality of life, more of the country’s revenue should be deployed to capital projects.

She stressed that to achieve this objective, recurrent expenditure has to be moderated, adding, ‘’Governments now operate under conditions of revenue scarcity and massive deficits. Thus a fundamental change in the way governments conduct their affairs has become imperative”.

The Efficiency Unit (E-Unit) was established to achieve a better cost structure for government and derive maximum value for money spent, as government needs to use its resources judiciously in “lean and fat” times, with the aim that government also needs to invest more in capital projects rather than recurrent expenditure.

The mandate of the E-Unit is on overhead expenditure and how to generate savings for government from the procurement process using government’s large buying power to reduce costs through administrative tools and other measures.

Oniha said, “Over the years and across the world, countries have had to deal with the issue of limited financial resources relative to their needs. The challenge, therefore, has always been how to distribute the limited finances between capital and recurrent expenditure where options have typically been to operate a deficit budget by borrowing to fund the gap, selling of some government’s assets and operate a balanced budget by matching expenditure to the available finances”.

She stated that the new thinking of government is to ensure the most efficient use of resources and that all opportunities to make savings and avoid waste and increase productivity are vigorously being pursued.

In his opening remarks, Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), Dr. Joe Abah, said in order to reduce the cost of running government’s business, the Federal Government has taken bolds step to ban first class travels by civil servants.

According to him, “We are also looking for ways of bringing training back here to Nigeria rather than having a group of people traveling abroad and spend foreign currency. We are looking at maximizing the use of office accommodation. The Public Procurement Act itself has recently been amended to encourage the purchase of made in Nigeria goods among others”.

On the mandate of the BPSR, Dr. Abah noted, ‘’We are out to improving systems and processes, improving the ways that things are done, explaining government policies which is what this event is all about, bringing the person in charge of the policy to explain to the public what they are doing and how they are doing it.

“We are presently working with the Head of Service of the Federation to improve the Performance Service of Civil Servants. We are working on rationalization of agencies and parastatals. We are working and making sure the merged ministries work, and we are helping to reform all the MDAs”.