Nigeria’s proliferation of federal agencies has become a direct drag on investment, according to former NACCIMA National President Dele Oye, who is calling on the federal government to immediately implement the long-shelved Oronsaye Report and warning that the country’s more than 900 Ministries, Departments and Agencies are imposing over N862 billion in costs on the economy.
Oye, who chairs the Alliance for Economic Research and Ethics (AERE), argues the continued expansion of government agencies despite repeated calls for rationalisation has produced overlapping mandates, duplicated regulatory functions and rising compliance costs for businesses. The Steve Oronsaye Presidential Committee on the Restructuring and Rationalisation of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies, inaugurated in 2012, had already recommended sweeping mergers, abolitions and restructuring, with projected savings of about N862 billion between 2012 and 2015. The government approved aspects of the report in 2023, but implementation has largely stalled even as the number of federal agencies has climbed past 900, according to Oye.
Oye points to the recent sealing of three milk factories in Awada, Onitsha, by the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) as a concrete example of the inefficiency multiple overlapping regulators create. Manufacturers, he noted, must simultaneously satisfy the FCCPC, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), environmental agencies, local governments and other bodies. “In Nigeria, a manufacturer producing dairy products does not face one regulator, they face a constellation. NAFDAC demands product registration and facility inspection. SON demands standards compliance and certification. The FCCPC demands consumer protection compliance. Add the State Environmental Agency, Local Government trade licences and perhaps the Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS) and you have a recipe for paralysis,” said Oye.
The overlapping enforcement power, in Oye’s telling, has become farcical. He added, “The ancient wisdom captured in the proverb ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ has never been more apt. When three different federal agencies have the statutory power to seal a single factory, we are no longer talking about regulation. We are talking about an administrative circus where the performer is the private sector.” Oye’s sharpest critique targets what he describes as a shift in agency incentives from protecting consumers to generating fees. “This proliferation of agencies has created a perverse incentive structure that turns regulators into predators. Many MDAs have morphed from protective regulators into aggressive revenue generators. When agencies justify their existence by the fees, levies and fines they collect, enforcement becomes a profit centre,” shared Oye.
The numbers back the claim in scale, if not in cause: N658 billion was deducted as the cost of revenue collection by government agencies in the first half of 2025 alone, with deductions from bodies including the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) now exceeding total allocations received by several states. “This is not regulation. This is legalised extortion. We are so focused on extracting revenue from the private sector that we are destroying the very engine that generates that revenue,” noted Oye. He further ties the regulatory burden directly to Nigeria’s development targets, noting the National Development Plan 2021-2025 acknowledges that more than 85% of the country’s investment requirements will need to come from the private sector, a target he argues the current regulatory framework actively undermines. He warns that excessive regulation is pushing businesses out of the formal economy entirely, weakening government oversight and eroding tax compliance in the process.
His call to action is blunt. Oye said, “The question is not whether reform is possible. The question is whether Nigeria’s leaders have the courage to pursue it. The private sector is bleeding. Investors are fleeing. Informal economic activity is exploding. And yet, we continue to add more agencies, more fees, more complexity. This is not governance. This is slow-motion economic suicide.” Investors weighing Nigeria’s regulatory environment against its market potential, Oye’s intervention adds a specific, quantified data point, N862 billion in projected inefficiency costs and N658 billion in half-year revenue-collection deductions, to a debate that has, until now, largely been argued in general terms.
