Giant stride

President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the implementation of the Steve Oransaye committee report on the rationalisation of government agencies. The committee set up by the Goodluck Jonathan administration had recommended the scrapping of some federal government agencies to reduce Nigeria's over-bloated recurrent expenditure and ultimately the cost of governance. It recommended a reduction in the number of statutory agencies from 263 to 161, while advocating for the merger of some agencies. Minister of finance, budget and national planning, Zainab Ahmed, has disclosed that the president will be implementing the recommendations. She made the comment when she appeared on a programme on Channels Television. Ahmed said the federal government had started to address the issue of high costs of governance by implementing the report. Her words:  “The president has approved that this administration should implement the recommendations of the Oransaye report. “So, the Orans...

In response to the National Assembly’s earlier expression of displeasure at the manner in which the federal government handled the conditional cash transfer scheme, the presidency has fired back, stating that poor Nigerians are not people who can access internet or have bank verification number(BVN). This was contained in a statement signed by  Maryam Uwais, Special Adviser to the President on Social Investments on Thursday, where details of how National Social Investment Programme works and how the poor and vulnerable are reached. “The National Cash Transfer Programme derives all the cash transfer beneficiaries from a National Social Register (NSR), comprising State Social Registers that are developed and hosted by the State Ministries of Panning of each State. “The process for objective identification of poor and vulnerable households is as provided in the Financing Agreement (F.A) signed between Nigeria and the World Bank, for which purpose the World Bank IDA Cred...

President Muhammadu Buhari signed the COVID-19 Regulations, 2020, which declared COVID-19 a dangerous infectious disease on Monday. This according to Femi Adesina the special adviser to the President, is in line with the exercising of the powers conferred on Buhari by Sections 2, 3 and 4 of the Quarantine Act (CAP Q2 LFN 2004), and all other powers enabling him in that behalf. In his statement on Monday, the presidential spokesman noted that the regulations, effective March 30, 2020, also gave legal backing to the various measures outlined in the President’s National Broadcast on  March 29, 2020, such as Restriction/Cessation of Movement in Lagos, FCT and Ogun State and others toward containing the spread of the pandemic in the country. He added that to ensure that Nigerians can still perform on-line transactions and use ATMs whilst observing these restrictions, exemption is granted financial system and money markets to allow very skeletal operations in order to keep th...

As a precautionary measure to control the spread of the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus, the Federal Government of Nigeria has placed a travel ban on thirteen (13) countries with very serious cases of the Coronavirus. The countries are China, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, Japan, France, Germany, Norway, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Switzerland.