Ghana is currently basking in the victory of the passage by the country’s National Assembly of her own version of Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB). Crude oil became Ghana’s second main export product in 2013, having increased moderately in the two previous years from $2.7 billion in 2011 to $3 billion in 2012, according to reports. Before then, gold was the country’s highest foreign exchange earner. Indeed, Ghana became an oil producer in December 2010, with an estimated 85,000 barrels per day being pumped at the country’s ‘Jubilee Field’. Ghana’s legislature, according to reports, passed the Petroleum Production and Exploration Bill into law penultimate Thursday to replace the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act, 1984.
The country’s Energy Minister, Emmanuel Buah, was quoted as saying the new law would create an attractive environment for potential investors to participate in the sector by providing certainty and transparency in the ground rules for operations.

On the contrary, Nigeria struck oil on Sunday, January 15, 1956 in an onshore oilfield located at Oloibiri in the current Ogbia Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. For several decades after the first military coup of January 15, 1966;
and the civil war that followed a year after, the country that hitherto relied on cash crops as her major foreign exchange earner switched over to crude oil as a major source of survival.
But the rules of engagement in the oil sector have remained as riotous and corrupt as ever, thus necessitating the introduction of the Nigerian PIB which has been
rotting away in the National Assembly since 2009. The law was to replace several other obsolete oil sector laws. Worse still, Nigerians no longer know the exact
state of the bill which now has different versions, some ‘forged’ and others ‘original’.

In March this year, Senate President, Bukola Saraki, said a different version of the PIB harmonised by the Senate and the House of Representatives was virtually ready for the consideration of both chambers of the National Assembly. The PIB was
first presented to NASS in 2009.
Since then, conflict of interest between the Federal Government and NASS, on the one hand; and on the other, Joint Venture (JV) partners, their local foot soldiers, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and sundry other oil sector players’ ploy to ensure that transparency has no place in the nation’s oil sector hasbeen stalling the passage of the bill.

In 2012, the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan raised the alarm that a fake version of the PIB was in circulation.
The original version of the draft bill, however, planned to increase taxes paid by oil
firms, unbundle the NNPC into profitably-run companies and create an inspectorate unit as well as an independent regulatory agency. Indeed, the original draft PIB contained comprehensive regulatory, legal, fiscal and operational framework to guide oil sector investors, with the ultimate goal of making Nigeria a global investment destination as far as that sector is concerned. It equally made provisions for transparency in the declaration of oil exports and receipts, et cetera.

Jonathan’s Presidency’s alarm on the existence of a fake PIB came at a time when Nigerians were full of hope that NASS would start work full blast on the bill. Some months after the alarm, however, the then Petroleum Resources Minister,
Mrs. Diezani Allison-Madueke, confirmed to the London-based international news agency, Reuters, that a harmonised and authentic version of the PIB was sent to NASS for deliberation and passage to law in the third quarter of 2012.

Today, four years after the ‘authentic’ version of the bill went to NASS, it is yet to be passed to law. In October last year, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, said the country was losing a whopping N3 trillion
yearly (about $15 billion) from the uncertainties created by
the non-passage of the PIB by NASS.

The Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Inter-Parliamentary Affairs as at 2012, Rep Daniel Reyenieju, did assure Nigerians that the PIB which Allison-Madueke said was sent to NASS that year would be thoroughly scrutinized “using
all possible prisms of analysis and contextualized international best practices” before being passed to law. Reyenieju stated in addition: “Nigeria being for now
a mono-cultural economy which is almost solely rested on crude oil, it is through a good regulatory law that Nigeria can derive the necessary maximum advantage
from this wasted asset”.

Whither then is the Nigerian PIB? How serious-minded is Nigeria’s executive and legislature even today?

When you hear things like these, you wonder if truly a government exists at all in this country. Exactly what do they do during their overpaid tenure and their so called sleepless nights?

They want to raise revenue yet they cannot pass a simple bill to raise 3 trillion naira? Whatever the obstacle is, shouldn't it be tackled by all possible means?

The mass of the people rotting away with the economy and they leave a bill like these unaddressed? Well, then, I guess we have our answers. We are on our own.