The Permanent Secretary Of Minister Of Finance,Mr Mahmoud Isa-Dutse Reveals Where And How FG Saves N20bn Monthly

The permanent secretary to the Nigerian ministry of finance, Mr Mahmoud Isa-Dutse has states that the federal government was currently saving about N20bn monthly since they began to remove ghost workers from the system.


  While speaking to the press in Abuja on Tuesday, November 22, he said this was another reason for setting up a workshop on cost management.

   The workshop was organised for directors and top civil servants of Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) by the Efficiency unit of the ministry of finance.

Isa-Dutse also explained that the reduction in cost of
monthly wages was from N165 billion to N145 billion
monthly was also very necessary.
The permanent secretary highlighted that it was done with
the assistance of the presidential committee on Audit of the
MDAs.

  According to Vanguard, he also made it clear that the
committee had the responsibility of continuous auditing of
MDAs’ salaries and wages.
Mr Isa-Dutse declared the workshop open on behalf of the
Mrs Kemi Adeosun the minister of finance.

  She made it clear
that the Buhari government was very much interested in
cutting costs and giving value for money spent.

   Speaking on the main objective of the workshop, Mrs
Adeosun said it was to sensitise public officials to cost and
share with them some tools to manage the cost.

    She said: “It is basically to train on how, as a government, we
can manage our cost better. It is not only imperative that we
look at ways to generate more money for government, but at the
same time we must also manage our cost more efficiently.

  “As we have seen even though revenue has gone down in the
last couple of years, expenditure, particularly overhead has not
gone down correspondingly and that has created fiscal
pressures for government.

  “What we are doing is to look at whatever ways we can to
generate more savings for government to be run more
efficiently.

  “We want the savings realised from the efficiencies to be
channeled into higher priority areas like infrastructure and social
welfare spending.”

  Mrs Patience Oniha who is the head of the Efficiency unit,
explained that in the last one year that the unit was
established, it had saved the government about N15 billion.
According to Mrs Oniha the savings, were from overheads
and reduction in excessive foreign travels and other
allowances.

  She concluded that more funds would be saved by
consciously eliminating waste of government resources and
that her unit was working on several other items to be added
to the list of cost cutting items.