Finance minister debunks plan to sack govt workers

Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, says there is no plan by the Federal Government to lay off government workers, Top Naija reports.

Ahmed said this on NTA’s ‘Good Morning Nigeria’ programme on Thursday, which was monitored by TopNaija.

The minister denied claims that the government was planning on sacking workers in order to save funds.

She said President Muhammadu Buhari had said repeatedly that no worker would be sacked. The minister, however, said the government would encourage people to leave government jobs by giving them incentives.

Ahmed said the government would reduce overheads by ensuring that government agencies are merged.

She added, “Mr President doesn’t want to disengage staff. That is what he has directed from the beginning of his administration. He also directed that we pay salaries. The Federal Government has never failed in paying salaries and he said we must always pay pensions.

“So, he has been consistent in those directives and we have followed those directives to the letter.”

When asked how the government would cut personnel costs, Ahmed said, “Well, we do hope that at the end of the exercise, some agencies will be merged and it will cut down operational costs.

“And also we will be able to come up with incentive packages to retrain people and redeploy them in some areas where they are useful. For example, we still have a very high need for teachers so we can retrain people and send them to teach but also incentive packages to exit. Again, that is also money. If you want people to exit you have to pay them.

“That is an incentive package so that they can go. That is why it is taking a lot of time because it is not easy to decide on this. Everything centres on resources. We need resources and if we had a lot of money, we would just give very beautiful incentive packages and people would exit and go and start their businesses and we would reduce the size of the personnel cost.”

Ahmed has served the Nigerian public in various high-ranking positions, including as managing director of the Kaduna State of Nigeria’s investment company, and also the Chief Finance Officer of the Nigeria mobile telecommunications company. Zainab was reappointed and sworn in as the Minister of Finance on 21 August 2019 by the President.