Nigerian government denies plans to disengage workers 

The Federal Government of Nigeria on Thursday refuted reports on its plans to disengage some civil servants over the economic cash crunch.

Public outcries had followed reports on Thursday claiming that the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration had plans to sack government workers.

But the Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, said on Thursday when she appeared on NTA’s ‘Good Morning Nigeria’ programme that Buhari has no such plans to sack.

According to her, ‘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.

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

Responding to a question on the government move to trim budgetary costs in various MDAs, 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.’