- Our West African neighbour has passed their version of PIB while we dither
Ghana made what could be described as regional triumph with the passage into law of that country’s version of Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) on August 4. Tagged Petroleum Production and Exploration Bill, its aim, like bills of similar nature, is to strengthen and improve the legal environment governing the exploration and production of fossil fuel.
An interesting thing about the development is that before now, the country’s petroleum industry had a 1984 law which regulated the sector; but the country still felt the need to rework the law to, as the energy minister, Emmanuel Kofi Armah Buah noted, make it tighter and to reflect international standards and best practices.
With this development, Ghana has sent a message to the international community that it is set to encourage multinational corporations to do business with it as well as attract more investment into the industry.
For a country where oil was discovered only about nine years ago, this is a feat of sorts, compared with Nigeria where oil was discovered in 1956 but is still battling to have its PIB passed into law. The law governing the sector in Nigeria for now is fairly obsolete.
The irony of the PIB is that virtually everybody agrees on its imperative if Nigeria is to draw maximum benefit from the oil sector. It is important for investors to know the rules guiding an industry they want to go into; irrespective of whether the laws are tough or soft; at least they know what it stipulates. It is better than winking in the dark, which is what investment in the country’s oil sector looks like in the present circumstance.
One very good reason the country ought to have taken the bill more seriously is the fact that oil is the country’s mainstay; it provides about 80 per cent of the country’s revenue. Not only this, Nigeria, according to the former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, loses about $15billion in investments every year to the lack of a Petroleum Industry Act needed to curb the series of unwholesome practices in the petroleum sector. “I can tell you that the average source of volumes in investments that we are losing on an annual basis because of the lack of PIB is in excess of $15billion per year,” Kachikwu told the Senate at his ministerial screening, last year.
In spite of all these advantages that underscore the importance of the bill, successive legislative houses have continued to dither with the PIB since 2008 when it was first sent to the National Assembly by the Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua administration. That was during the sixth National Assembly; we are now in the eighth, with no significant indication that the bill will make any major progress even now. Although the bill was re-introduced to the 7th assembly in 2012 by former President Goodluck Jonathan, with about 47 out of 360 members of the House of Representatives members present when it was passed in the twilight of their tenure, it failed to get a concurrent passage from the Senate.
President Muhammadu Buhari should send an executive bill on PIB to the National Assembly to enable the legislators deliberate extensively on it and be able to pass it so it does not end up coming too late for the legislature to work on, as was the experience in the 7th assembly.
Ghana’s passage of its own petroleum bill should serve as a wake-up call on the National Assembly to do not just the needful but the rightful on this all-important bill when it eventually comes. The PIB is too important to be trivialised or politicised
