NEITI urges Buhari to fast track passage of PIB
The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to take the lead and infuse urgency into the process of passing a new law for the Nigerian petroleum industry saying thethe country has experienced huge losses to the tune of about $200billion following alack in enabling law.
NEITI in its latest policy brief entitled “The Urgency of a New Petroleum Sector Law”, regretted that the process of enacting a new law for Nigeria’s petroleum sector has gone on for far too long, and at enormous costs to the country adding that more urgency and better coordination was needed to ensure passage of what it described as very important bill.
“NEITI therefore calls on President Muhammadu Buhari to invest his “presidential capital on this all-important legislation, putting in place a mechanism for rallying the stakeholders to a consensus, and using this law as one of the pillars of the bridge to a much needed economic recovery”.
According to the brief, Nigeria has experienced huge losses to the tune of about $200billion due to failure to pass an enabling law for the petroleum industry. Some of these loses it noted are projected investments due to regulatory uncertainty which experts have put at $120billion ($15 billion yearly).
It therefore advised that “the PIB ship should be rescued from a start-stop,unhurried and uncoordinated mode and brought swiftly ashore”.
NEITI maintained that the “PIB is one of the most important bills ever to be contemplated in Nigeria’s history, yet the one that has taken the most time and generated the most activity without legislation”.
NEITI underlined that as an agency set up to enthrone transparency and accountability in the extractive industries, it has legitimate interest in a petroleum law for the country.
It observed that the setbacks suffered by the bill were not due to poorunderstanding of the problems or the deficiency in expert inputs, but largely due to disagreements among stakeholders on the “regulatory frameworks,including power of the minister, ownership and control of the resources, host community benefits, environmental concerns, appropriate fiscal regime amongst other things stating that in the process, every administration has produced its own PIB draft(s), but not the law”.
NEITI therefore recommended that “an inclusive task team should be urgently empanelled, with the President in the lead and charged with building consensus among stakeholders. This task team should draw up a clear and well-communicated roadmap and fast-track the passage of the law in piece-meal rather than an omnibus approach”.
In the policy brief, NEITI expressed dismay at the inability of successive governments to enact a law for a sector that accounts for over 80% and 90% of its revenue and exports earnings respectively.
The policy brief noted that clear, unambiguous rules, predictable policy-makingand efficient regulations have been lacking in Nigeria’s petroleum sector, sincethe process of enacting a law for the sector commenced.
According to NEITI, “governance deficiencies have been equally prolific”. It says its 2013 audit of the oil and gas sector revealed that $10.4bn and N378.7bn(N3.2 trillion at the current exchange rate) were lost as a result of under-remittance, underpayments, inefficiencies, theft or absence of clear fiscal regimein Nigeria’s oil and gas sector.
The agency further stated that the losses in economic terms have equally been huge; the hemorrhage on Nigeria’s foreign reserves and value of the Naira due to imports of over $26.4Billion worth of refined petroleum products that should otherwise have been done in – country and loss of jobs in their hundreds of thousands for the teeming unemployed Nigerians.