The Social Action, a civil society organization, has called on the Minister of Petroleum Resources to make the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) his first line charge.
This is contained in a statement signed by Vivian Bellonwu Okafor and made available to Newsdiaryonline Thursday.
According to her the tasks before the minister are enormous, including challenges of the downstream, roughages that line the mid and upstream sectors, traumatized environment and region bearing the oil.
“Effective delivery will to a large extent be a factor of proper priority placement and in this regard the long-drawn petroleum industry Bill, PIB needs to be placed in proper focus.
“Noble as the objectives of this bill may be, with part of its aim seeking to establish a framework for the creation of commercially oriented and profit-driven petroleum entities to ensure value addition and internalization of the petroleum industry, the PIB has suffered seemingly intractable setbacks in its legislative journey, leading to its non-passage since introduction in 2008 to date,” the statement read.
She added that the bill, “which was meant to establish key institutions for the Oil and Gas industry, provides effective regulation of operations and operators in the industry in line with global best practices and cater for the interest and aspirations of local host communities in the industry has been left comatose in Nigeria’s parliament with the Oil and Gas industry operating in similar status, replete with archaic laws and outdated policies that have worked to truncate the country’s socio-economic development goals.
“Mindful of the fact the PIB holds far-reaching import for both the environment and economy of the country, we urge the new minister of state for petroleum, Timipre Silva, to take on the task of delivering this bill pointedly and make it a focal action point of his mandate to see to it that the PIB breaks the jinx of bill status to being a law. Such a landmark feat will no doubt see ripple effect across the nation’s socio-economic sector,” the statement further noted.
