The Secretary of the Nigerian Labour Congress ( NLC),Ekiti Council, Dr Israel Taiwo, described the proposed merger as ill-timed.
Taiwo, in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria ( NAN) on Thursday in Akure, said that the Oronsaye report was obsolete and could not be used in the current economic realities in the country.
“ The merger of some of the agencies and departments are ill-timed. The report would have been outdated by now, given the reality on ground because the yardsticks used then are not the same now.
“The working class people are still battling with the present economic realities and the Federal Government is planning to stealthily downsize through merger,” he said.
He added that the proposed merger would further worsen the unemployment rate in the country, asking the government to reconstitute another committee for a report that would meet the contemporary time.
First of all, we must commend the Man, Asiwaju, for having the political will to take hard and tough decisions that are necessary to pull this country out of the danger zone we find ourselves politically, socially and economically.
From the removal of fuel subsidy, restructuring of the chaotic forex market and now to the restructuring of the country's unwieldy bureaucracy, one cannot but acknowledge the president audacity to act decisively and therefore give him some kudos.
In his opinion, Mr Gbenga Obanigba, the Chief Consultant of the St. Meso Consulting Firm Ltd. Lagos, said that there was need to make some adjustments before the implementation of the report by the government.
“It is of my candid opinion that we need to make some adjustments here and there and tune-up the initial Oronsaye report itself to take care of the current exigencies before we plunge headlong into the unwholesome implementation of the report.
“You ask me why? The Oronsaye report was put together in 2012, a decade ago. Some of the recommendations it contains have become obsolete, while some new innovations have occured that may have to be included therein.
“ Under normal circumstances, a decade old reform should be due for another review going by the complexities of the growing technology world.
“Some of the recommendations therein may have been rendered outdated by the growing wave of ICT and tech innovations,” he said.
According to him, the on-going impact of fiat money, shitcoins, bitcoins, binance, cryptocurrency and social media space were not captured in the report.
“ Now we have to deal with them. You can see how binance is wrecking havoc on our currency. We need government agency in that area to regulate those activities. Ditto for the menace of social media. If the main media can be regulated, I see no reason why we should allow the ongoing pollution in the social media space to continue.
“We need to deploy the modern dog (hound) to hunt the modern rabbit (hare),” he said.
Obanigba said that government’s agencies such as the National Orientation Agency, social intervention agencies, should either be upscaled to perform those crucial roles for which they were established or scraped entirely and allow the parent ministry to continue with the assigned functions.
He stated that he was confident that President Bola Tinubu would take a right decision and embrace good advice on the implementation of the report.
“Ask yourself, what is the function of the national orientation agency as it is presently constituted when we still have ministry of information, NTA, Radio Nigeria, Voice of Nigeria etc, performing the same overlapping functions. What actually do they do in that department?
“But one thing I am absolutely sure of is that Asiwaju being a streetwise person himself, knows what to do. He knows when to strike. He knows when retreat. He knows when to hit and equally knows when to run. He will surely take the right decisions and at the right time too,” he stated.
0 Comments