The Senate, on Wednesday, urged the Federal Government to reduce the number of its agencies in order to save cost of governance.

The red chamber took the decision following the approval of the report of its joint committee on Finance and National Planning on the 2021-2023 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper presented by the Chairman, Solomon Adeola.

Speaking after the approval of the report, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, agreed with the submissions of earlier speakers during the debate that the cost of governance was too high and that a lot of the agencies must be scrapped to save the nation’s economy.

He said most of the agencies were created to serve specific purposes but noted that they were still being retained many years after.

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He said, ” Many of the agencies were created to address specific challenges as of the time they were created. They are now irrelevant and have become conduit pipes that we appropriate money to every year while adding no value to the nation again.

“We need to work with the executive arm of government on this. I know it will be a tough task because some will argue that the exercise would lead to massive job losses but we have to find a way out of the current situation because the cost of governance is too high.

“It is not the reduction of the National Assembly budget that would reduce the cost of governance. There is no money in the National Assembly. Our budget is just about N128bn out of a national budget of N13trn.

“We cannot reduce the cost of governance just by reducing the cost of running the activities of the National Assembly. We need to have a holistic, practical and realistic way of reducing agencies and cost of running those agencies that would survive.”