Finance, Budget and National Planning Minister Mrs. Zainab Ahmed yesterday said the Federal Government under President Muhammadu Buhari’s watch has no plan to retrench workers.
The minister’s position negated what she said while giving a breakdown on the 2022 Appropriation Act on Wednesday.
Mrs. Ahmed had said the government was working out a severance package for those that would be affected by the staff rationalisation being planned.She said: “There is a special committee, led by the SGF, that is working on the review of agencies with the view to collapsing them partly, using the Oronsanye report.
“At the end of it, what we want to do is to reduce the size of government and also to reduce the size of personnel cost and part of it will be designing the exit packages that are realistic.”
But featuring on Nigerian Television (NTA) ‘Good Morning Nigeria’ programme, the minister said Buhari will not approve managers of the economy to lay off civil servants to cut down on recurrent expenditure.
According to him, the President “has made a commitment that he will not disengage staff”. Reacting to the report that government was planning to lay off workers to save money for capital expenditure, the finance minister said President Buhari had directed from the beginning of his administration that no staff should be disengaged.
“He (Buhari) insisted that salaries must be paid and the Federal Government has never failed to pay salaries,” Mrs. Ahmed said.
