BY LANRE OGUNDIPE
THERE is something strangely familiar about Nigeria’s repeated attempts to reform the machinery of government. A committee is established, an exhaustive report is produced, agencies are identified for merger or abolition, government announces implementation, and for a while the country is treated to the language of restructuring. Then the machinery settles back into its old rhythm.
The question this time is whether anything fundamental is actually changing.
The distinction matters. Civil service reform is not simply the reduction, merger or relocation of government agencies. It is about changing the way the state works. It is about clarifying responsibility, eliminating duplication, improving professional capacity, shortening the distance between policy and implementation, controlling administrative costs and making public institutions answerable for results.
Nigeria needs institutions that know precisely what they are responsible for, possess the personnel and technology required to perform those functions, and can be measured against clearly defined outcomes. If an institution is expensive but delivers an indispensable service efficiently, its cost cannot be judged in isolation. Conversely, an inexpensive institution that performs poorly may impose a far greater cost on society through delay, waste and failed policy.
Nigeria has been wrestling with this problem for decades.
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The Stephen Oronsaye Committee was established in 2011 to examine the structure and cost of federal government parastatals, commissions and agencies. Its report, submitted in 2012, examined 541 statutory and non statutory bodies and proposed sweeping rationalisation. Among its recommendations were reducing the 263 statutory agencies to 161, abolishing 38, merging 52 and reverting 14 to ministerial departments.
The scale of the diagnosis was significant. So was the political difficulty of acting on it.
For years, the report remained largely on the shelf. Successive administrations revisited it, reviewed it and discussed it, but implementation remained limited. In February 2024, the Federal Executive Council approved implementation of aspects of the report, presenting the exercise as part of an effort to reduce the cost and size of government.
Two years later, the question is no longer whether Nigeria knows that its public administration has structural problems. It clearly does.
The question is whether restructuring is producing a different state.
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That is where the distinction between reform and rearrangement becomes important.
An agency can disappear from the organisational chart while its functions, personnel, offices, boards and expenditure remain somewhere else. Two agencies can be merged without eliminating duplication. A department can be moved into a ministry without changing the process through which decisions are made. A new institution can even emerge while an existing institution continues to perform essentially the same function.
In such circumstances, the architecture may have changed while the machinery remains substantially the same.
This is not a theoretical concern. Recent developments have raised questions about whether new institutional proposals are always consistent with the government’s rationalisation agenda. That contradiction deserves serious attention because government cannot simultaneously preach institutional consolidation and continue expanding administrative structures without demonstrating why each additional structure is necessary.
There is another danger. The language of cost cutting can become a substitute for genuine reform.
A smaller bureaucracy is not automatically a better bureaucracy.
The objective should be value, not merely size.
Nigeria needs institutions that know precisely what they are responsible for, possess the personnel and technology required to perform those functions, and can be measured against clearly defined outcomes. If an institution is expensive but delivers an indispensable service efficiently, its cost cannot be judged in isolation. Conversely, an inexpensive institution that performs poorly may impose a far greater cost on society through delay, waste and failed policy.
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This is why the current reform effort inside the Federal Civil Service deserves to be distinguished from the narrower debate about the number of agencies.
The Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation has been pursuing digital transformation, performance management, human resource professionalisation and stronger accountability. The service has also moved towards digital human resource systems and is developing the next phase of its Federal Civil Service Strategy after the conclusion of the 2021 to 2025 plan.
These are important directions.
But they raise the more demanding question: Can these reforms survive the structures around them?
The Oronsaye report remains useful because it identified a problem that Nigeria has still not fully resolved. But a twelve-year-old report cannot by itself constitute a modern reform strategy. Government has changed. Technology has changed. The economy has changed. The number and character of public institutions have changed.
A digitally enabled bureaucracy can still be bureaucratic. A performance management system can still become another form to complete if performance does not affect responsibility. Professional training can improve individual capacity without necessarily correcting institutional duplication.
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Reform therefore has to travel beyond the civil servant to the institution in which the civil servant operates.
There is also a political dimension that cannot be ignored.
Government agencies are not merely administrative structures. They create offices, boards, appointments, budgets and institutional constituencies. Once an agency exists, people build careers around it. Interests develop around its budget. Legislators become associated with its establishment. Ministries defend their jurisdictions. Over time, an administrative structure can acquire a political life of its own.
That is one reason the Oronsaye exercise has proved so difficult.
The resistance to reform does not necessarily come from civil servants alone. It can come from the wider political system that benefits from institutional proliferation.
This is why reform cannot depend exclusively on presidential announcements.
Where legislation created an agency, legislation may be required to dismantle or merge it. Where constitutional provisions are involved, constitutional procedures must be followed. Where employees are affected, there must be a credible transition framework. Where mandates overlap, government must clearly determine who owns the function afterwards.
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Otherwise, restructuring becomes a prolonged administrative negotiation in which everybody changes position but nobody surrenders responsibility.
There is also a basic question of accountability.
Who is responsible when two institutions share a mandate and a policy fails?
Duplication does not merely waste money. It creates ambiguity.
When responsibility is divided among several institutions, each can point to another when results are poor. Citizens encounter the consequences as delays, conflicting directives, multiple approvals and an endless search for the official who can actually make a decision.
A serious reform programme must therefore be able to answer five simple questions about every public institution: Why does it exist? What exactly does it do? Why can another institution not do the same thing? What does it cost? And what measurable result does the country receive for that cost?
Those questions should be applied before another agency is created, not after it has acquired offices, staff and a budget.
The ultimate test of reform is therefore not the number of agencies abolished.
It is whether a citizen notices that government has become easier to deal with.
Can a business obtain an approval without navigating several overlapping authorities? Can a public servant understand where responsibility begins and ends? Can a minister hold an agency accountable for a measurable result? Can the government eliminate an institution without recreating its functions elsewhere under another name?
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If the answer to these questions remains uncertain, Nigeria may simply be rearranging the furniture inside the same house.
The country does not need another cycle of institutional cosmetics. It needs a public administration capable of translating political decisions into timely, measurable results.
The Oronsaye report remains useful because it identified a problem that Nigeria has still not fully resolved. But a twelve-year-old report cannot by itself constitute a modern reform strategy. Government has changed. Technology has changed. The economy has changed. The number and character of public institutions have changed.
The next stage must therefore combine rationalisation with institutional redesign.
The objective should not be government with fewer names on its organisational chart. It should be government with fewer points of confusion, fewer duplicated functions, clearer responsibility, better data, stronger professional capacity and measurable consequences for failure.
That is the difference between reforming the machinery of government and merely rearranging it.
Nigeria has announced enough reforms.
The country now needs to see what survives after the announcements.
Ogundipe, public affairs analyst and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes this column every Monday.
