Recently, the quarrel over the passage or non-passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, took me down memory lane. The year was 2008 and the month was August. My editors at TELL had commissioned me to do a story on the comatose Nigerian refineries. Ordinarily, I was lost. I had no idea what was happening with the refineries apart from the fact that when two of them were privatized by Olusegun Obasanjo, his predecessor rescinded that decision. I don’t blame the predecessor. The pressure on him was strong.
I took on the story anyway. First, I talked with some people considered key players in the petroleum industry, and luckily for me, they gave me some of the benefits of their hindsight. I visited the Lagos Apapa port where vessels from the United States, the UK, the Netherlands and Russia were waiting to unload their cargo of fuel. A feel of what was actually going on began to take shape – we were spending over N24 billion, an average of N2billion monthly to import fuel, even after we had spent a billion dollars in ‘revamping’ the refineries. When I was done with this background study, it occurred to me that if I was not careful, I would do a story without actually having visited one of the four refineries to do a look see. So I decided to visit one of them, the Warri Refinery. What I saw made me sick and if you are interested in finding out why, the details are with www.Nigeriansinamerica.com with the title, Nigeria’s sick Refineries! You can also find the story on TELL Magazine, No. 46 November 17, 2008, as Why Refineries May Never Work. ‘The fuel plant is the most important because it has aero-kerosene and topping units and the reforming and fluid catalytic cracking units… have not produced a single drop of kerosene because of politics and business people who import kerosene into the country. The aero kerosene unit, which is just at the entrance of WRPC, is nothing but a gigantic edifice of rusting pipes used as thoroughfare by workers who move from one section of the vast premises to another’, I had said in that report.
Eight years before that publication, I didn’t know that something was already being done about an oil and gas implementation committee, OGIC. Initiated by Edmund Daukoru, former minister of state for energy, it had three terms of reference: one, to formulate a national oil and gas policy. Two, to create a legal and regulatory framework for the sector and thirdly, to start a roadmap on which the reforms in the petroleum industry would be driven. Four years after, the draft bill, together with other allied documents was ready. It was ratified at the recommendation of former vice president Atiku Abubakar who headed the Privatization process at that time. That document morphed into the National Oil and Gas Policy in 2007. And just the same way he rescinded the sale of the refineries to Blue-star Consortium, President Yar’Adua also reconstituted the OGIC, under the chairmanship of Rilwanu Lukeman in September 2007, apparently to fine-tune the work of the previous committee. Eleven months after, the ‘new’ OGIC forwarded the following documents to the Federal Executive Council, FEC: a final report to Government in 2008, draft Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and a roadmap containing transitional provisions and the empanelling of Taskforces to implement the new legal and regulatory framework. FEC approved and bingo the document sailed to the National Assembly for passage into law.
It was here the shenanigans, the pussy-footings, and the doubtful dealings began. Yes, the proposed bill had been read twice at both chambers of ‘parliament’, public hearings have been held from the 27th to 31st of July 2009 and it seemed that history was going to be made. But no not so – at one of the public hearings, the Honourable Minister at that time inserted a memo, the Inter Agency Memo, IAM, to a brand new PIB Bill, completely alien to the one approved by FEC at that time for consideration at the National Assembly. Today there are all sorts of claims and counter claims, whether it is really the original PIB that is being debated at the National Assembly or the new one with the IAM.
At first, stakeholders were upbeat but became very upset at the way things had turned out. So about two weeks ago, some of them staged a protest at the vicinity of the National Assembly, demanding two things: one, that the National Assembly should scrutinize the PIB Bill and not pass the one the former petroleum minister ‘smuggled’ in with his IAM, and two, that they pass it quickly. When the National Assembly responded to this protest, most Nigerians were disappointed – they referred to the protesters as charlatans (even though they have retracted).
I fished out one of the ‘charlatans’, in fact the leader of the ‘charlatans, David Ugolor. He is executive director, Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice, ANEEJ, a civil society group based in Benin City and Abuja. I have known Ugolor for more than two decades. He and I used to have dinner together, roll on the same bed and lived under the same roof. As a young man then, he was angry that our society propagated a selfish agenda of supporting the rich against the poor. So he vowed not to be part of the system. That was how he started that NGO, called ANEEJ. A graduate of Economics from the Ambrose Ali University and father of three, Ugolor has travelled the world staging protests, holding seminars and giving speeches. He is recognized by Oxfam, Jubilee 2000, and was the first chairman of NEITI – National Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative. He led an anti-corruption crusade known as Publish what you Pay. This is one young man we are very proud of. So when I saw him on TY being referred to as ‘charlatan’, I was not amused. I only wondered at who really the charlatan really was: if it was not members of the National Assembly who often resorted to fisticuffs to divide their allowances, then it cannot be David Ugolor.
When I got in touch with Ugolor over this matter, he revealed the implications of smuggling in the new PIB through an Inter Agency Memo, IAM. According to him, both the IAM and the new PIB are inimical to the privatization process because they are a hindrance to ongoing reforms in the petroleum sector. He said this may checkmate the powers of the FEC in matters relating to envisaged reforms in the oil and gas sector, and would make the NNPC and the Petroleum Ministry their own reformers by establishing a vacuum over whom should reform the sector.
I have seen copies of the IAM and the new PIB Bill. While I found the 383-PDF- document meticulously crafted, I found it hard to make any absolute comments on it. This is because I envisage that to make a credible comparative analysis, I should also be able to see the old PIB and compare. But I couldn’t lay my hands on it. So, what I have decided to do here is look at some pertinent issues, particularly from a view much more in tune with BM Communication’s vision and scope. I will do this because anybody could easily pick holes in any argument I will proffer here if it favours my relationship with David Ugolor.
In that document, I found out that there was a strong emphasis on expanding Nigeria’s current oil and gas production capacity. This aim, according to the IAM, is to ensure that government gets more money. The document also seeks to reduce ‘unconstitutional’ funds accruing to people in the oil producing states and seeks to allow more local people get involved in the oil and gas production processes. On the face of it, all of these are issues that may lead one to commend the vision of the crafters of the new bill and join the push for its quick passage. But I have
my reservations sirs. One, all the emphasis is on getting money either into government or money getting into our people’s hands. The proposed bill has nothing in place for putting money aside for reducing our dependence on a mono-economy; all over the world today, intensive and extensive research and money go into investigating other methods of powering economies, wealth creation and revenue generation. Scientists in Europe and the Americas are cooking up all sorts of schemes to ensure that in ten or twenty years, our oil will be useless to them and to us. I know of one such ‘scheme’ in a compact laboratory in the heart of Europe – scientists there remove the most unproductive gene from a grain of rice or maize and replace it with a productive one from either a rat, cockroach or termite. When they sow those seeds, they yield just the same fecund way a rat or a termite produces in fecundity. Next, they load up all of that rice or maize together with cow dung in specialized containers and the gas produced from here is sent and sold through tunnels all over Europe. This kind of thinking is not only going on in Europe – Brazil, Mozambique, Indonesia and Malaysia – these are places where they produce fuel from groundnuts, sugar cane and palm oil – products that thrive here but have been ignored because of the easy monies that pour in from crude oil.
So here we are, pushing for the passage of a new PIB, that seeks to expand large-scale exploration of oil with its allied gas flares in Kwale, Uzere and in Bayelsa, Rivers states, that have irreversibly damaged the ecosystem and biodiversity of the Niger Delta – recall that even though this physical and environmental damage is the result of 50 years of oil exploration in Nigeria, the do-or-die approach to politics in Nigeria is directly related to the easy monies from the oil and gas revenues that are mostly shared in Abuja and Aso Rock.
And so here we are once more, safely ignorant [or pretending to be] that pushing to expand large-scale oil and gas exploration as against pushing to invest 70% of funds from oil and gas in renewable energy, inevitably contributes to global warming, and climate change – and climate change can safely be held responsible for the calamities that have taken place in the coastal cities of Australia and Japan – are we in any doubt that our coastal cities are also in danger of a tsunami? Shouldn’t the PIB be looking at setting aside funds for this kind of eventuality?
Our emphasis for now should not be on expanding oil and gas production, no. It should be on providing legislation for monies that come in from oil and gas to be spent in repairing the damage to the oil and gas producing areas. This is a serious matter. Look back to early 2010 at the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and see both the seriousness of that three-month disaster and the response from the US president: 4.9million barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf and this has been dubbed the worst environmental disaster the US has ever faced. In spite of this however, there is no way you could compare a 3-month damage with the 50 years of oil spills and environmental degradation in the Niger Delta. BM Communications supports a quick passage of the PIB. But this must include using 70% of monies from the Niger Delta to repair damage done there and most importantly, set aside the remaining for research and investment in renewable energy.
