The government of President Muhammadu Buhari
may have put a stop to employment into the civil service, Kemi Adeosun, the
country’s finance minister, has reportedly said. The administration had
promised massive reduction in the rate of unemployment in the country while the
All Progressives Congress (APC) campaigned during the 2015 general election.
Adeosun reportedly told the Senate on
Tuesday, October 25, 2016, that the government no longer had no reason to take
more people into the public sector. Nigeria is currently suffering from a huge
economic crunch and an inability to make the 2016 budget perform optimally.
The APC also recently took responsibility for
the country’s current woes but promised that 2017 would witness a positive lift.
She said what the government planned to do now is strengthen the private sector
for more jobs to be created. The Herald reports that apart from this, the
minister maintained that the government would sustain its over N6 trillion
national budget in 2017.
Read what Adeosun said: “Even when the
economy was growing, when GDP was eight and nine, we had a massive unemployment
problem especially our graduates. I’m sure most of us know that graduates
stayed for up to ten years without jobs and the only sector that was really
creating jobs was government and government now, has now reached its limit,
that a 165 billion amount, I don’t think government can reasonably employ any
more people so we have to develop our private sector and to do that, we need
infrastructures. “So, this government is really set about driving
infrastructures and that is what we have been trying to do. Everything we have
been trying to do, whether it’s been chasing ghost workers, whether it’s
efficiency, it all end on one thing-creating that head road so that we can
invest in infrastructures.
“We know that if you build a road, in 40 or 50 years time, it would still be there but when you go for training and you go and come back, it’s over. So, it’s a different kind of demand but we think that it’s the foundation of getting this economy moving and creating jobs for our people. So, we have embarked on that, we have been releasing capitals for roads, for power and for so many things. But we have uncovered some challenges, some of which I think we will be coming back to speak to you as a committee.
“Some of the contractors haven’t been paid
since 2012, so they just sat on the money and little can they be blamed because
their problem is ‘how do I know that this money I have, I would be able to get
another one for the next four years.’ So, while we expect them to go back to
sites, in fact, in some cases, the bank even sat on their money, didn’t even
allow them access to the money at all. The inspecting activities which
everybody thought would be forthcoming has not been forthcoming, we have to
solve that problem. I would be coming to talk to you on what we are proposing
to do. “We believe that most people in Nigeria, whether contractors, whether….,
are owed something by the federal government and we have to sit down and sort
it out. The same problem with the states, they too, are claiming that they are
owed, the reason why they can’t pay is that they are owed by the federal
government.
So we need to have a discussion, deal with
the problem so that the economy can move forward. There’s good news on the
horizon in the sense that the prediction that the oil price will be as low as
$20 proved to be false alarm and the prediction now is that the oil price will
stabilize between $50 and $60, so what Nigeria now has to do is to balance her
books so that if it is $50, even if it is $40, we will be able to balance. “I
want to tell you that most of the initiatives have really elicited a lot of
savings. We have been able to reduce our payroll. The first payroll I saw when
I came here was N165billion and I think the last one I signed was N165billion,
it’s going down every month. We are removing ghost workers, we are removing
dead people, we are removing those who should have never been there in the
first place and that is a continuous exercise we must keep up. “Honestly, we
believe that government has to be very frugal with public money money because
it’s scarce and this money belongs to everybody, so we can’t spend it any how.
We have to spend it judiciously.
I want
to really assure you that we are committed to that because we can say that if
we can complete one or two major projects, this economy can change. “We are
working very hard with the Ministry of Transportation on the rail project which
will bring rail back from Lagos to Kano. That corridor will open up our
agriculture, instead of carrying goods on the roads. “We believe this will
create a lot of jobs for our people. Similarly, we are working with the
Ministry of Works for our new major road projects including looking at how we
can maybe get some private sector money so that we can do some tar roads
because we believe that when somebody spends five hours on the road, on a
journey that should take one hour, he has already paid the toll, whether is not
in terms of his tyre, or his petrol or his time or his health.
“So,
if you ask that person to pay N200 and do that journey in 50 minutes, I don’t
think Nigerians would have a problem. What we want is infrastructures. “We have
gotten together another public private initiative – the Family Homes Fund,
which is private sector driven and the aim of that fund is to find a finances
solution to housing development for low cost housing. Most of the houses are
around N700 million or less and people will be able to put down just ten
percent and park in and then pay the rest over up to 20 years under mortgage
system.
“I want to tell you that I remain very
confident about our economy. By this time next year, this economy will become a
different economy. Just think within, don’t lose heart, we are going to be able
to turn around the economy because now, the oil price is stable, we have
stabilized our finances, a lot of the waste has stopped. A lot of the stealing
has also stopped so it’s only for us now to start completing some projects.”
Source: Naij
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