Another ‘Fake’ Agency? This Is No Longer Funny -By Pius Mordi

It looks like it is easier to set up an agency operating with the name of the Federal Government than to open a social media account. To open an account with any of the major social media platforms, you are required to agree to adhere to its community rules. Whenever the subscriber runs foul of the explicitly stated rules, a sanction is inevitable. It could be the suspension of the account or, worse, outright take down.

That seems to be a tougher task than to set up an agency of the Federal Government, secure office accommodation within the precincts of the Presidency, open an account with the Central Bank, get official allocations from the federal budget and recruit staff. The amazing thing is that the same principal organs of the presidency that facilitated the birthing of the new organisations will do a volte-face to declare the same agencies as ‘fake.’

First, is the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) which had earlier been allocated ₦1.3 billion in the 2026 national budget with the prospects of additional funds. Now, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) informed Nigerians of another phantom agency.

The National Brands Development and Made-in-Nigeria Special Project Office led by George Buchi Nwabueze operates illegally within the premises of the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF), the heart of the federal bureaucracy. It had reached out to state governors for funding and support flaunting its address in the office of OSGF as imprimatur.

This is not happenstance. It is the unblemished manifestation of a failed system. The civil service is designed to operate as the engine room of government and governance, the proverbial “soldier go, soldier come, barracks will remain” institution. It is the reason any government can afford to appoint anybody, just anybody, without consideration to competence, to head a ministry or agency. The civil service is always there to school the new appointee on the operations and dynamics of the agency. But the overwhelming size of the civil service and large number of ministries, departments and agencies have made it one big immobile elephant that has become an albatross and impediment to governance.

Nigeria has hundreds of federal MDAs, but there is no single official fixed number because new bodies are created or merged regularly by acts of the National Assembly or unilaterally by the presidency. The exact tally fluctuates with administrative restructuring and even the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation which is supposed to dynamically maintain the exact lists has proved to be helpless.

In April 2012, the Report of the Presidential Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions, and Agencies concluded that Nigeria’s federal bureaucracy is heavily bloated, inefficient, and riddled with overlapping mandates, was submitted to President Goodluck Jonathan. Known as the Steve Oronsaye Report, the committee identified 541 federal parastatals, commissions, and agencies (both statutory and non-statutory) operating at the time. It recommended reducing the 263 statutory agencies down to 161. The road map was anchored on the outright scrapping of 38 agencies, merging of 52 institutions with overlapping functions while 14 agencies were slated to revert back into regular departments within their parent ministries.

The 541 agencies were identified way back in 2012. Jonathan and successive administrations could not muster the political will to act on the report. Rather, hundreds more have been created since then, many without an Act of Parliament by the National Assembly. The undoing of the civil service is its adoption of military fiat and clichés intended to make any inquiry into the authenticity or genuineness of a directive impossible. “Order from above” is the popular and destructive and over used phrase. It is empty, banal, hackneyed and yet authoritative.

When Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to the Federal Government, was told that he had lost his job over the infamous grass cutting scandal, he inquired where the order came and was it “order from above” to which he was said to asked where is “above”. And he moved on.

While there is no doubt that the system has grossly been compromised leading to the corrupting of the checks and guardrails, it is feared that there might be a race among the various agencies to uncover additional ‘fake’ agencies. According to ICPC Chairman, Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu, some senior public servants colluded to set up the fictitious office in the heart of the presidency which is what the office of the secretary to the government of the federation truly is. But George Buchi Nwabueze, the man said to be behind the project, is fighting back. Beyond invoking the security agencies to arrest him as has already been ordered, there should be a dispassionate investigation of the process and the level of rot in the system. After the unraveling of two agencies, it is possible that there might be more.

Cleaning up the rot in the civil service will require a multi-pronged approach. Just as it took Steve Oronsaye, a retired head of service, in 2012 to get a first insight into the bloated nature of the service. Nothing is impossible within the service. When rules or laws are made, it is only personnel from the service which has the responsibility for implementing the new rules to also upend it. The Oronsaye Report is an indispensable material in any review and reform of the service. An essential ingredient is the removal of the human element in the bureaucratic process as much as possible.

In effect, there should be aggressive digitisation and digitalisation of the civil service. Again, the doctrine of “order from above” inherited from the military must be discarded. For every new initiative, rule or directive, the relevant agencies and personnel should no longer be intimidated into silence and acquiescence by the nebulous impression that it is beyond query.
It is a long and tortuous road ahead. But if the civil service will shed toga of being an albatross, some people call it evil service, it needs fundamental reforms.