Fuel scarcity shows PIA is inefficient – Ex-NBA president Agbakoba

A former Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) president, Olisa Agbakoba, restated on Thursday his call for the repeal of the less-than-three-year-old Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), citing the fuel queues in many parts of the country as a mark of inefficiency of the law.

“I am interested in efficiency. I am interested in how the oil we bring out of our ground. Since the year 2000, $33 trillion of oil (proceeds) has entered our coffers. Show me the result – broken schools, broken roads, no hospitals, poverty in the land, so something is wrong, and if something is wrong, you must look at it.

“If the PIA is such a fantastic bill, why are we having the problem of fuel scarcity?” Mr Agbakoba, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), said this on Thursday on Arise Television’s Morning Show.

Long queues of petrol buyers have surfaced in the last one week in different parts of the country, amid a shortage in the supply of the product to marketers.

President Bola Tinubu announced the withdrawal of the petrol subsidy in his inauguration speech in May last year, hoping that deregulating the supply of the product under the PIA regime would remove bottlenecks in the supply chain and boost its profitability.

Mr Tinubu also hoped the policy would help the government save trillions of naira that would be spent on subsidising the product and eventually make energy more affordable to Nigerians.

Mr Agbakoba conceded that he was among the proponents of commercialising the country’s oil and gas sector, which the PIA sought to achieve.

He said he hoped that commercialising the sector would bring about efficiency.

However, he said he changed his stance after realising that the policy only amounted to privatising the government’s assets into the “pockets of individuals”.

The Petroleum Industry Act

The PIA was signed into law in August 2021, promising to overhaul the Nigerian petroleum industry’s institutional, regulatory and fiscal frameworks.

It sought to promote economic growth and energy availability at affordable prices.

The Act stipulated that the NNPC transform into a limited liability company to become a profit-making organisation.

It also granted access to international capital markets and aimed to redefine Nigeria’s oil and gas landscape.

Reasons why the Act should be repealed

Before his Arise TV appearance on Thursday, the former NBA president had called for a repeal of the PIA.

Mr Agbakoba, who led the umbrella body of all Nigerian lawyers between 2006 and 2008, criticised the law for creating multiple agencies with overlapping roles.

However, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) and the Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Commission (MDPC) – two agencies created by the PIA – pushed back on Mr Agbakoba’s criticism, stating that the law was a blessing to the nation’s oil and gas industry.

He said that the provision in the PIA giving room for joint ventures between Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and International Oil Companies (IOCs) was against the provision of section 44 (3) of the Nigerian constitution.

The constitutional provision says: “Notwithstanding the foregoing provisions of this section, the entire property in and control of all minerals, mineral oils and natural gas in under or upon any land in Nigeria or in, under or upon the territorial waters and the Exclusive Economic Zone of Nigeria shall vest in the Government of the Federation and shall be managed in such manner as may be prescribed by the National Assembly.”

Mr Agbakoba, a maritime law expert, maintained that relinquishing Nigeria’s natural resources to IOCs contradicts the meaning of sovereignty guaranteed to Nigerians under section 14 of the constitution.

He also claimed that the PIA lacks any provisions that addressed Nigerians’ development while questioning the Act’s soundness.

He also criticised the dual roles of Nigeria’s president as the Minister of Petroleum and the Head of State. He argued that the president would not have enough time to handle the ministry and the affairs of the state efficiently.

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He also blamed the oil and gas sector’s inability to yield profit on corruption. He said the problem is less about incompetence.

During the military era, Mr Agbakoba led Nigeria’s foremost human rights organisation, the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO).

In the last few years, Mr Agbakoba, a former member of the National Judicial Council (NJC), has criticised the Nigerian judiciary for not living up to expectations in dispensing justice.

He is one of the outspoken advocates of appointing lawyers directly from the bar to the Supreme Court bench to bring about diversity of expertise and thoughts and deepen the quality of the court’s decision.

He once showed interest in the appointment to the Supreme Court bench but has not demonstrated any keenness about it recently.