The permanent secretary to the Nigerian ministry of finance, Mr Mahmoud Isa-Dutse has states that the federal government was currently saving about N20bn monthly since they began to remove ghost workers from the system.
While speaking to the press in Abuja on Tuesday, November 22, he said this was another reason for setting up a workshop on cost management.
The workshop was organised for directors and top civil servants of Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) by the Efficiency unit of the ministry of finance.
Isa-Dutse also explained that the reduction in cost of monthly wages was from N165 billion to N145 billion monthly was also very necessary. The permanent secretary highlighted that it was done with the assistance of the presidential committee on Audit of the MDAs.
According to Vanguard, he also made it clear that the committee had the responsibility of continuous auditing of MDAs’ salaries and wages.
Mr Isa-Dutse declared the workshop open on behalf of the Mrs Kemi Adeosun the minister of finance. She made it clear that the Buhari government was very much interested in cutting costs and giving value for money spent.
Speaking on the main objective of the workshop, Mrs Adeosun said it was to sensitise public officials to cost and share with them some tools to manage the cost. She said: “It is basically to train on how, as a government, we can manage our cost better.
It is not only imperative that we look at ways to generate more money for government, but at the same time we must also manage our cost more efficiently. “As we have seen even though revenue has gone down in the last couple of years, expenditure, particularly overhead has not gone down correspondingly and that has created fiscal pressures for government.
“What we are doing is to look at whatever ways we can to generate more savings for government to be run more efficiently. “We want the savings realised from the efficiencies to be channeled into higher priority areas like infrastructure and social welfare spending.”
Mrs Patience Oniha who is the head of the Efficiency unit, explained that in the last one year that the unit was established, it had saved the government about N15 billion.
According to Mrs Oniha the savings, were from overheads and reduction in excessive foreign travels and other allowances.
She concluded that more funds would be saved by consciously eliminating waste of government resources and that her unit was working on several other items to be added to the list of cost cutting items.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s minister of health, Professor Isaac Adewole while speaking on Tuesday, November 22, said inadequate funding of the health sector by the federal government had made Nigeria a laughing stock before the world. Below is a video of how the FG dealt with ghost workers earlier in the year:
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