Environmental Group: signing of PIB, Wrong Message to Oil Bearing Communities of Niger Delta
An environmental body with the name, Home of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), has declared the signing of the contentious Petroleum Industrial Bill (PIB) into law by President Muhammadu, as a wrong signal to the oil extraction impacted people, communities and other Nigerians who expected a listening ear from him
President Buhari had on Monday, assented to the PIB thus making it Petroleum Industrial Act (PIA).
On July 1, 2021, the Senate and the House of Representatives had recommended a 3% and 5% respectively as benefits to host communities.
Reacting to the coming into law of the PIB, Director of HOMEF, Mr. Nnimmo Bassey, in a statement in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria, said he was shocked that President Buhari went ahead to sign the bill without taking into consideration, voices of the suffering people of the Niger Delta.
According to him, “I had believed and expected that the President would listen to the voices of Nigerians who have suffered over six decades of unmitigated ecological assault and socio-economic marginalization”.
He further noted that there are some key defects in the bill that needed to be addressed before being signed into law. “One is that it makes nonsense of Nigeria’s climate change Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). It also locks in gas flaring which is a major emitter of greenhouse gases by extending a regime of insignificant fines. In addition, at a time when the world is shifting from fossil fuels, 30% of the profit of the NNPC would already be sunk into searching for oil field dusters or bottomless speculative search for crude oil in so-called frontier basins”, Bassey declared.
Secondly, he said: “HOMEF believes that the PIB will not halt the move by oil companies to shift offshore and leave their mess in already traumatized communities as oil companies are making these moves in order to escape accountability and because they will pay minuscule amounts as royalties in deep waters.
HOMEF also believes that the Host Community funds as set up will have an overbearing influence of oil companies, describing the law as a colonial system in its construction by giving oil companies virtually absolute powers to ride roughshod over the interest of Niger Delta communities in terms of who sets up the boards and who decides what projects get to be executed.
Tied to this HOMEF started, is the criminalization of communities over oil facilities incidents as communities according to the group, “cannot be held accountable for incidents done by individuals.”
Comparing holding communities accountable for inability of corporations to secure their pipelines and wellhead as comparable to ascribing banditry to a whole community simply because a bandit carried out nefarious actions in their territory, the environmental body added that the clause criminalizing communities appear to be inserted so as to ensure that the host communities’ funds eventually are used to pay for the irresponsible action of oil companies who neither carry out needed integrity checks on their facilities nor replace obsolete ones.