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Dr. Chris Ngige, is the Minister at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment. In this interview with Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf and Frank Ikpefan, he allayed the fears of possible job cut in the nation’s public service ahead of the planned implementation of the Stephen Oronsaye Committee report and other sundry issues. Excerpts
THERE are fears that the implementation of the Stephen Oronsaye Committee report may lead to the scrapping of some MDAs and subsequent job loss. What is the true situation?
Already some MDAs have compiled a list of civil servants that would be laid off with some of them being issued letters of compulsory leave ahead of the planned layoffs. How would you react to this?
I am not aware, I don’t think there is an iota of truth to it. But if you know the MDAs you can let us know but I am not aware. If there is such thing happening in MDAs, the National Civil Service Union and Association of Senior Civil Servants they would have petitioned myself and the Office of the HoS. It is only the Office of the HoS that can do that. If there are parastatals doing that they must first seek the permission of their parent ministry before doing that. So I am not aware and I don’t think it is true but if it is true then such an agency and the head of that agency, they are on their own. They don’t have our approval for now to even compile any names not to talk about putting them (workers) on compulsory leave. I do know that in the NDDC, there were some people put on compulsory leave but that’s an administrative matter. When some people are being investigated and they don’t want them to interfere with the investigation, government usually ask such people to go on leave. If there is even a first line discovery of breach of rules in terms of maybe procurement, in terms of fraud, government can place you on suspension. This is what I know as far as that issue is concerned.
From available information members of the organised labour unions are already mobilising their members for a showdown. Can the country afford another labour unrest at this critical time?
They (unions) are seeing danger where there is none. Nobody has communicated anything to them officially. What the Minister of Finance said – I kept on saying it; is that the Oronsaye report and its white paper will be reviewed. What she meant is that it will be brought into the floor of this government. First of all, at our level at that Presidential Committee on Salaries, Income and Wages, we have detailed the Oronsaye report as one of the documents, raw materials we chose to work. We have even the El-Rufai report on the restructuring of the civil service, we have also the Afolabi report and we have also even of recent, the Prof. Itse Sagay Committee (PACAC) report. We are going to gather all those documents- all of them will be used and if they lead to the interrogation of the MDAs we will do so. We only did the first phase of the work which is how to get down the personnel cost and a temporary recommendation went to Mr. President which he has approved; that placed an embargo on federal recruitment of staff and replacement of staff in MDAs except for the MDAs that are responsible for defense and health matters.
Of course when you merge agencies and parastatals – we don’t think so many of them will be merged, but when they are merged, the target is for us to save money in terms of running cost. But where also you have personnel overlap we will look for a way first to redistribute the overlap or the surplus personnel to those who have need for them. So we will send them to where they are needed. If you come back to a parastatal with the same schedule, of course, one has to go to another institution and in an institution where you have persons either leaving the service or dropping out from the service, those people will take those personnel. The main idea being that government is not desirous to lay people off. But if Los, you have places where you have surplus personnel and some people opt to go, of course government will accept such voluntary withdrawal of service and we will also pay the necessary emolument for such officers to depart the service.
The OPS made some proposal to the government to help cushion the effects of the fallouts of COVID 19 on businesses such tax holiday among other incentives. How far has the government gone in acquiescing to their demands?
Why not. We have gotten their proposal and I have passed it on to the Economic Sustainability Committee which Mr. President set up to look at the issue of Covid -19 pandemic, the economic effect on both the public and private sector. The federal government is studying the proposal to know where we will also come in because the essence being that we don’t want excruciating pain will result from these closures that will led to job losses in any way.
What should Nigerians expect in the coming weeks?
We want to make our health workers happy so we are targeting and getting more personal protective equipment (PPE) for them so that they can be more protected. We are also targeting that in the coming weeks we should be able to pay them their enhanced hazard and inducement allowances. The payment will begin very soon. There is another committee fine tuning it. We are going to pay them for two months at least – April and May. That is what to expect and we also expect that God will assist us to open up our economy and bring down the pandemic so that the rise we are now experiencing will flatten out so that we can start going back to our normal way of life.
