The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning,
Zainab Ahmed, says there is no plan by the Federal Government to lay off
government workers.
Ahmed said this on NTA’s ‘Good Morning Nigeria’ programme on
Thursday.
The minister denied claims that the government was planning
on sacking workers in order to save funds.
She said the President, Muhammadu Buhari, had said
repeatedly that no worker would be sacked. The minister, however, said the
government would encourage people to leave government jobs by giving them
incentives.
Ahmed said the government would reduce overheads by ensuring
that government agencies are merged.
She added, “Mr President doesn’t want to disengage staff.
That is what he has directed from the beginning of his administration. He also
directed that we pay salaries. The Federal Government has never failed in
paying salaries and he said we must always pay pensions.
“So, he has been consistent in those directives and we have
followed those directives to the letter.”
When asked how the government would cut personnel costs,
Ahmed said, “Well, we do hope that at the end of the exercise, some agencies
will be merged and it will cut down operational costs.
“And also we will be able to come up with incentive packages
to retrain people and redeploy them in some areas where they are useful. For
example, we still have a very high need for teachers so we can retrain people
and send them to teach but also incentive packages to exit. Again, that is also
money. If you want people to exit you have to pay them.
“That is an incentive package so that they can go. That is
why it is taking a lot of time because it is not easy to decide on this.
Everything centres on resources. We need resources and if we had a lot of
money, we would just give very beautiful incentive packages and people would
exit and go and start their businesses and we would reduce the size of the
personnel cost.”
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