House C’ttee: PIB Passage Delayed by Presidency, NNPC

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The House of Representatives Committee on Commerce has said the presidency and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) are responsible for the delay in the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).
 
The committee said the presidency and the NNPC were constantly interfering on its work.
 
The Chairman of the committee, Hon. Sylvestre Ogbaga (PDP, Ebonyi), disclosed this yesterday in Abuja while addressing participants at a one-day interactive session on investment in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector entitled: “Enhancing, The Oil and Gas Value Chain.”
 
According to him, the legislature would have passed the PIB, but it had been battling with issues of undue interferences from the NNPC and the presidency.
 
“People always think that the delay being experienced by the PIB is caused by the National Assembly which is very wrong. The bill would have been passed if not for the way both the executive and the NNPC kept recalling it for content update and modification in line with current trends, so its not solely on the part of the National Assembly as Nigerians are being made to believe,” he said.
 
On the theme of the interactive session, he explained that Nigeria, with the largest market in Africa, had the potential of harnessing investment  in refining, storage, transportation and marketing of petroleum, petrochemicals and allied products.
 
“The Nigerian oil and gas value chain is undergoing a radical transformation following government’s commitment towards the key legislative reforms and aspiration firmly becoming the undisputed regional hub for gas based industries such as fertilizers, petrochemical and ethanol,” Ogbaga.
 
In their contributions, both Dr. Soala Ariweriokuma of the NNPC and Chris Kaka of the Chartered Institute of Financial Investment of Nigeria (CIFIN) urged the lawmakers to expedite actions to bring about relevant legislations that would minimise losses and maximise economic gains.
 
According to Soala, “Nigeria may be a major producer of oil and gas in the world, but the world is not waiting for Nigeria to arrive. The recent discoveries of shale oil and shale gas in the United States, Europe and China have adversely affected the market for Nigerian cargos especially to the US. Before now, Nigeria was shipping about 13 cargos of gas to the US per annum, but that has been reduced to one due to the discovery of shale gas.”
 
On his part,  Kaka who harped on the review of the nations tax administration with respect to how much time is allowed for an investor to enjoy tax holiday, offered that: “The indiscriminate giving of tax incentives to investors in the sector needs to be reviewed to favour the nation’s economy if we must correct the incidence of running our budgets on deficit which has been on since 2002. A situation where a company such as the NLNG would be given a tax holiday up to the period of ten years is not healthy for the economy.”
 
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