Nigeria, Sep 30, 2016 – The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) says Nigeria has lost a whopping sum of $200 billion due to non passage of the Nigerian Petroleum Industry Bill(PIB).
The PIB has been pending in the National Assembly since 2012. But in the latest report, NEITI pointed out that Nigeria has experienced the losses due to failure to pass an enabling law for the petroleum industry.
It added that some of these loses are projected investments due to regulatory uncertainty which experts have put at $120billion ($15 billion yearly).
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 regime in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector.
The agency further stated that the loses 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.
NEITI traced the journey towards the enactment of a petroleum law to the past sixteen years when the process of reforms for the sector started. It noted that Nigeria’s oil and gas sector has continued to deteriorate due to the fact that the laws governing the industry are not sufficient for effective regulation and in some instances too outdated to be relevant in today’s global energy environment.
The situation, it said is in contrast to Ghana’s experience in passing its own law. It noted that as a new oil producing country, Ghana’s petroleum sector may not be as complicated as that of Nigeria, however, the fact that Ghana passed the law for its petroleum sector two years after commencing the process should be a lesson for Nigeria.
NEITI while acknowledging the plurality of action on the petroleum sector law, said that there is no evidence that Nigeria has learnt from its past experiences to guarantee that the present journey will be any different.
