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Osinbajo canvasses for professionalization of public service

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has canvassed for the professionalization of the nation’s public service instead of clamouring for a cut in the cost of governance in the country.

 

Osinbajo made this suggestion yesterday in his keynote address at the Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola Leadership Colloquium organized to mark the birthday of the Minister of Interior.

 

Responding to a question on the cost of running the public service, the Vice President, according to a release by his spokesman, Laolu Akande, said the focus should be on people being in the right place in the public service. While conceding to the argument that the government has a large public service, Osinbajo maintained that there are still huge shortages in, for example, health and education sectors.

 

He said: “So, there are massive shortages in many parts of the public service whereas you find redundancies in other aspects of the public service. “We should be training and engaging more teachers, nurses, doctors and several other participants in the public service, and we may end up with more or less the same cost.

 

But my view is that those cost themselves, so long that we are spending them right, so long as they are spent on the right quality of public servants, are costs that we should bear. “I am not certain that just a willy-nilly cost cutting is the solution, long term.

 

Of course, we find within the public service, so many who are not qualified, many whose jobs are replicated, huge redundancies, we need to correct those redundancies, we need to ensure that those who are not qualified are either retrained or we let them go.”

 

“But we must ensure that we do not allow ourselves to be trapped in a way of thinking that suggests that the problem is really just the cost of governance, so that if we just downsize, everything will be alright. I think the problem is a bit larger than that. I think we have to look at really, the professionalization of our public service, ensuring that we have the right quality  people in the right jobs.”

 

The Vice President said that the Buhari’s administration had deployed significant resources to address the challenge of education and health care in the country. According to him, the government reserved the one percent minimum portion of Consolidated Revenue Fund since 2018, amounting to N55 billion, to fund the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF).

 

The Fund, he stressed, was designed to deliver a guaranteed set of health services to all Nigerians, through the national network of Primary Health Care Centers. He commended Aregbesola’s performance when he was the governor of Osun state for his ability to run an administration with the lowest national poverty rate despite getting the lowest federal allocations.

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