In a bid to make do with limited revenue, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari is now applying some cost-cutting techniques, expected to help in alleviating the country’s current economic predicament.

On the last day of July, the recommendations by the Efficiency Unit of the Federal Ministry of Finance, to reduce spending by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) were approved by the Nigerian President. According to the Nigerian government, these measures were informed by the huge national infrastructural deficits as well as wasteful and unnecessary expenditure on overheads by MDAs. It is expected that the implementation of these measures, will afford the government more funds for infrastructure and services that better impact citizens.

Here are some of the measures approved by President Buhari:

1. The ban of the procurement and distribution of conference bags, t-shirts and other souvenirs at events and activities such as conferences, workshops and seminars organised and funded by Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
2. Ban on the printing of unnecessary publications and books of short shelf life which have no real value to the concerned public institutions or the citizens. Now, such publications should be on their websites which have the added benefit of wider visibility, and print only limited numbers of hard copies of such publications.
3. The issuance of specific guidelines that would reduce the cost of printing invitation cards, programme of events, brochures, folders and notepads. Amongst the guidelines are that they should be in black and white and limited to only one page and in the case of brochures, they should be streamlined to contain only essential information.

Commendably, the Federal Government of Nigeria has taken a bold and necessary step to cut excesses that will benefit the country in the long run. However, beyond the MDAs being targeted, there is a need for the cost-cutting measures to include executive and legislative spending as well. Lawmakers should be made to reduce the current costs in running the National Assembly (NASS). In the 2016 budget, a huge sum of N115bn was allocated to the National Assembly with no clear definition of what, exactly, the money will be expended on. Nigerians’ clamours for an #OpenNASS have since met with deaf ears, as the Saraki-led NASS has continued to keep its ways secret. This is coming at a time when the minimum monthly wage of a Nigerian civil worker, stands at N18,000 but a senator smiles home with about N13m in salary annual allowances. The suspected financial frivolities of the legislative arm of government have to end, if Nigeria is really serious about cutting costs across the board.

Also, in the 2016 budget, some lines of expenditure do not seem efficient. For instance, the N19.8bn meant for travels, N12.2bn for monitoring and evaluation, N24.8bn for purchase of vehicles, N1.6bn billed for budget preparation and N6.78bn budgeted for the purchase of computers can be pruned down, especially now that the economy is bad. In order to achieve better results through cutting of costs, there is still more the Nigerian government can learn from Tanzania’s John Magufuli.