The Steve Oronsaye Report is a hot-button document that every president since the past 12 years had wished but failed to implement. The political will has been spectacularly lacking. This prompts the question: how far is President Bola Tinubu willing to go in confronting it?

Over a decade ago when our national debt stock was low and the federal budget was chiefly shared between the recurrent and capital votes, the former, as of 2011, took 74 per cent leaving a miserly 36 per cent for capital spending. This year, the situation is a bit different because debt service now takes up to 46 per cent, leaving the rest to capital and recurrent.

Former President Goodluck Jonathan responded to the clamour to pare the size of the Federal Government bureaucracy and reduce the ratio of recurrent expenditure in our annual budgets. He set up the Presidential Committee on the Rationalisation and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies with the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Dr Stephen Osagiede Oronsaye as the Chairman.

The Committee submitted its 800-page report after eight months and recommended a drastic slashing of the size of the Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs. The Committee suggested that 263 agencies should be slashed to 161. They also called for the scrapping of 38 bodies, merging of 52 and other measures. An infuriated Permanent Secretary from the North was reported to have confronted Oronsaye in his office, accusing him of nursing a hidden agenda.

Though President Jonathan appeared in a hurry to procure a white paper on the panel’s report, he failed to implement it. Former President Muhammadu Buhari raised a panel to review Jonathan’s white paper, but also failed to act. Already, Tinubu has appointed his own group of experts to re-examine Buhari’s white paper and proffer recommendations to help reduce the cost of governance.

Many critics are sceptical. The urgent need to reduce the size of government expenditure was largely ignored by Tinubu, who raised the size of his cabinet to 48, the highest in our history, at the worst juncture of our economic woes.

To successfully implement the Oronsaye Report, President Tinubu must overcome overwhelming political and Labour pressures. The Federal Bureaucracy was a strong component of regional dominance under the military era. Our federal lawmakers who make the creation of new government agencies part of strategies to implement every bill they sponsor have worsened the proliferation.

Implementation of the Oronsaye Report must be a strategic component of a grand agenda to reduce the size of the Federal Government while transferring more powers to the federating units. It must be part of a conscious agenda towards true federalism.

We hope Tinubu will succeed where his predecessors failed in sanitising our federal bureaucracy.