THE Federal Government on Tuesday said that the three per cent host community fund in the Petroleum Industry Act was a fair deal for the people of Niger Delta.
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, who disclosed this on Tuesday, said the implementation of the Act would result in the availability of a lot of money to the communities.
The Minister, during an interaction with the media in Abuja, said: “A lot of figures have been bandied about as the desirable figure.
Some say 10 per cent and there are some extremists who even say 100 per cent, some even say 25 per cent.
But what is the philosophy behind the PIB and the times in which we stand? “Today, we are in the last mile of the oil economy and that is a common knowledge to everybody. It means we are in a race to produce as much oil as we can because in the end if global trends overtake us there will still be oil in the ground but there will be no market for oil. After all, coal didn’t finish in the ground before they moved away from coal.
“So, we are in that race to produce as much oil as we can now. As a country, we have a direction that we are going to. Right now, if you talk about three per cent in the Bill, for us in the Niger Delta, I asked them, three per cent of something is that not better than 100 per cent of what you don’t know?”
The Minister also said with the signing of the Petroleum Industry Bill into law by President Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) would become a commercial entity within the next six months.
The Act provides that the NNPC must function as a limited liability company with all its shares invested in the federal, state and local governments. Sylva stated further that though the PIA had made the deregulation of the oil sector a matter of law, the government would retain the pump price of Petroleum Motor Spirit (PMS) at N162 until a proper framework for the deregulation was put in place.
The Minister said, “We will keep it (PMS pump price) within the N162 – N165 per litre band for the time being. But we are trying to work out the processes to come to fruition, because right now we don’t even have a choice anymore. It is a matter of law.
“But we have to ensure that when this happens, the ordinary Nigerian is well catered for before that law is actually operated.”
He said that already, a consensus had been reached that the Federal Government should deregulate the sector but there was a need to put a framework in place. His words: “We have agreed between labour and us that we need to put a framework in place for the implementation of deregulation.
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VERDICT: MISLEADING!
and then