The Report of the Presidential Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies is a document of 2011–2012, not of 2023. The committee was inaugurated by President Goodluck Jonathan on 18 August 2011 under Stephen Oronsaye, then Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, and submitted its report on 16 April 2012. It is filed here under 2012, the year of submission; the 2024 implementation order is part of its afterlife, not its date.
The Oronsaye Report ran to hundreds of pages and covered 541 federal agencies. Its core recommendations were sweeping: abolish 38 agencies entirely, merge 52 others into parent ministries, consolidate 14 overlapping bodies into 7, and reduce the total number of statutory agencies from 541 to 161, saving the federal government an estimated ₦862 billion over three years in overhead, salaries, and duplication costs. Among the most politically sensitive recommendations were the merging of the National Human Rights Commission into the Ministry of Justice, the folding of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission into the Finance Ministry, and the abolition of the Council on Establishment. The report also recommended reversing the statutory creation of many agencies whose functions were adequately covered by existing ministries.
Jonathan's government issued a white paper in 2014 that accepted only a minority of the recommendations, and transmitted no implementing bill. Buhari's government revisited it in 2016 and commissioned a white paper but still did not implement it, in part because the National Assembly—whose budgetary interests were tied to agency proliferation—was resistant. In February 2024, President Bola Tinubu approved full implementation of the Oronsaye Report's recommendations and inaugurated an Implementation Committee to operationalise them. A list of agencies to be scrapped or merged was published by the Federal Government, with initial executive orders issued for select consolidations. Implementation remained ongoing and contested as of mid-2024, with some agencies successfully merged while others mounted legal and legislative resistance.