Zainab Ahmed, the Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, has stated that there are no plans to lay off government employees in the country.
On Thursday, January 6, Ahmed denied claims that the federal government was planning to dismiss workers to save money on NTA's 'Good Morning Nigeria' programme.
While the Minister stated that FG will encourage people to leave government positions by providing incentives, he also stated that there are plans to minimise overheads by merging government entities.
Ahmed 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.”
Ahmed expressed his views on the federal government's strategy to reduce employee expenditures;
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.”