President Muhammadu Buhari has one
of two decisions to make, and quickly
too, if Nigeria is to escape the hammer
of the global Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative (EITI) over the
recent sack of the Board of the Nigerian
Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative (NEITI).
The sack of the 15-member National
Stakeholders Working Group (NSWG),
which is the NEITI Board, among 247
other Boards of Federal parastatals and
agencies dissolved by the president last
week, has stirred a storm within the
agency.
PREMIUM TIMES’ investigations revealed
that the president may have
inadvertently overlooked a key
provision in the NEITI Act 2007 that
requires strict compliance with the
Board’s tenure, in view of the sensitive
nature of its mandate in the oil and gas
industry.
Section 7 of the NEITI Act states: “A
person appointed as a member of the
NSWG shall hold office for 4 years and
no more.”
NEITI’s primary mandate is to monitor,
promote and regulate transparency and
accountability in the management of
Nigeria’s oil, gas and mining revenues.
To exercise this mandate, the agency
conducts financial and process audits of
the extractive industries’ operations
every year, to ensure compliance with
due process and transparency in
revenues paid and received by
government as well as their applications.
In performing these critical roles, the
law expects that the annual audit
processes are not disrupted and the
work of NEITI jeopardized, by ensuring
that its board is always in place to give
necessary approvals on a timely basis.
Consequently, no government is allowed
to take any action that could be
construed a threat to the work of NEITI,
particularly the sack of its governing
body responsible for the formulation of
policies, programmes and strategies for
effective implementation of its mandate.
Close industry watchers say in the face
of the ensuing crisis, the president must
move swiftly to either reconstitute the
dissolved Board, or reverse his decision
by reinstating its members to enable
them complete their tenure in August
2016.
Politicians on the board would be
excited to support a reinstatement. But,
15 civil society groups working for the
promotion of transparency and
accountability in the country’s
extractive industries, are already rooting
for the immediate re-constitution of the
Board.
The groups had on Tuesday distanced
themselves from calls alluding to the
need to prevail on President Buhari to
reverse his decision, describing such
calls as “a distraction, self-serving and
unilateral”.
The Executive Director, Civil Society
Legislative and Advocacy Centre, Auwal
Rafsanjani, who led his colleagues to
sign a petition to the EITI International
Chair on Tuesday, said Nigerians want
to see a board consisting fresh and non-
partisan technocrats, with deep
knowledge, competence, experience,
integrity and vision that align with
government’s determination to fight
corruption and pursue total reforms in
the extractive industry.
Mr. Rafsanjani said the former Board
had lost its capacity to act independently
and neutrally on issues of transparency
and accountability in the industry, as
most of its members were card-carrying
members of the Peoples Democratic
Party (PDP), with little or no interest in
EITI/NEITI.
Regardless, the board of the
International EITI appears to be keeping
an eye closely on how the crisis is
resolved, with the crucial global EITI
compliant re-validation exercise
schedule for Nigeria in January 2016 a
few months away.
Revalidation is an independent
evaluation process to assess the level of
compliance by EITI-member countries
with the implementation principles and
standards to promote transparency and
accountability in the management of
extractive industries revenues.
In her response to PREMIUM TIMES’
enquiries on the crisis on Wednesday,
EITI Chair, Clare Short, said the global
transparency agency would stress the
need for all parties in the industry to
come together to resolve the issue to
avoid possible sanctions against the
country.
“I assume that the first step will be for
NEITI to inform the Presidency that the
NEITI Law requires that full terms of the
NSWG are served and that company and
civil society representatives must be
selected by their own constituencies,”
Mrs. Short said via email.
“Then, depending on the response we
(EITI) can consider next steps. I feel sure
that the government will not want to
destabilise NEITI. I do hope you can all
sit together and sort out the
misunderstanding.”
A suspension by the EITI may tar the
image of a new administration hoping to
project transparency and accountability.
A former Chairman of the Board of
NEITI, Assisi Asobie, who told PREMIUM
TIMES on Thursday that the issue was all
about law and due process, apart from
the need to ensure that the Board was in
place to work to ensure that Nigeria
received revalidation next year as EITI
compliant country.
“If the annual audit report is presented
today by the auditors, the Executive
Secretary has no power to approve it.
Only the Board does. The implication is
that in the absence of the Board, the
work of NEITI is technically
automatically stalled,” Mr. Asobie
explained.
Mr. Asobie recalled a similar experience
in 2011 when the then president,
Goodluck Jonathan, also dissolved the
Board and had to rescind his decision
when his attention was drawn to the
implication, so as not to jeopardize the
work of NEITI.

source: www.premiumtimesng.com/business/oil-and-gas/187213-why-buhari-may-revisit-dissolution-of-neiti-board.html

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