The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed has denied claims that the Federal Government was planning to cut down on its workforce.

Ahmed who made this disclosure as a guest on a monitored programme on NTA, “Good Morning Nigeria” declared the government has no plans to lay off workers, principally to save funds and reduce bloated expenditure as posited by many.

The minister, however, revealed the government would encourage people to leave government jobs by giving them incentives,adding plans have been put in place to reduce overheads by merging government agencies.

In Ahmed’s words;

“Well, we do hope that at the end of the exercise, some agencies will be merged and it will cut down operational costs.

And also we will be able to come up with incentive packages to retrain people and redeploy them in some areas where they are useful. For example, we still have a very high need for teachers so we can retrain people and send them to teach but also incentive packages to exit. Again, that is also money. If you want people to exit you have to pay them.

That is an incentive package so that they can go. That is why it is taking a lot of time because it is not easy to decide on this. Everything centres on resources. We need resources and if we had a lot of money, we would just give very beautiful incentive packages and people would exit and go and start their businesses and we would reduce the size of the personnel cost.”