POLITICS – Latest news update as the Chairman, Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources (Upstream), Omotayo Alasoadura, has accused members of the committee in the Sixth and Seventh National Assembly of collecting bribe in dollars to scuttle the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill (PIGB).
It gathered that an unnamed senator reportedly got $10 million bribe to scuttle the bill.
Alasoadura, who blamed the delay in the passage of the PIGB on the petrodollar bribe offered by powerful Nigerians and some oil companies to senators, admitted that he was also offered millions of dollars bribe in order to kill the bill. He, however, did not say if other members of the petroleum committee he chairs were offered similar bribe.
His words: “They offered me money, but I said no, that the little money that God had provided for me is enough to cater for my wellbeing and that of my family. One of them said a former Chairman of the Committee I head got $10 million to scuttle the bill. I could have taken the money and resigned from the National Assembly.
“So the politics, lobby and so on from those who do not want the bill to see the light of the day was terrible. But to the glory of God, the bill was passed in two hours because I did a lot of underground work like meeting people, convincing them about the need for it and areas where people feel they were not satisfied especially, the frontier oil exploration outside the South-South.”
Speaking after he received a letter of commendation from the Correspondents Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) in Akure, the Ondo State capital, Alasoadura said the petrodollar bribe offered to the members of the lawmakers delayed the passage of the bill for 13 years.
According to him, the hurdles placed before the bill did not allow it to pass through the Sixth and Seventh Assemblies despite the transparency and accountability it offers in the management of the nation’s petroleum resources.
The bill drives to split the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) into Nigerian Petroleum Assets Management (NPAM) and National Oil Company (NOC).
According to him, “The bill establishes a framework for the creation of commercially-oriented and profit-driven entities that ensure value addition and internalization of the country’s petroleum industry.”
He stressed that the imbalance in the National Assembly, which often times make the vote from the northern senators to defeat the southern legislators; coupled with the efforts of oil merchants who benefit from the status quo, stalled the bill for years.
The senator said: “The politics behind the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) is more than what you have to do to get the bill passed. In fact, there was a day I was abused by a set of people who came to lobby me for the bill not to be passed.
“Unless you can withstand pressure, you won’t be able to do what I did. And by the time we were to take the bill to the floor of the house for passage, we booked three days because we thought it would be stormy.
“The South-South wants everything; the North does not want it. So, when it comes to the floor of the Senate, it will die because the Northern senators are more than the Southern senators.
“In the National Assembly, the politics there is different from that of your state. National Assembly is about lobby. It is about getting people to support you. If they don’t support you, if you bring the best bill to the floor of the Senate, it will die.”
However, the bill, after 13 years of delay in the National Assembly, was recently passed by the legislators.
Alasoadura, who was Ondo state Commissioner for Finance and Planning between 2003 and 2009, explained that PIB was subtly divided into four parts so as to overcome the initial hurdles to the passage of the bill.
He said before the passage of the bill, 52 senators were already convinced and appended their signatures when they knew that all interests were mutually protected.
The lawmaker, however, noted that the bill that was subtly lifted from the previous PIB that did not scale through the Sixth and Seventh Assemblies because of its voluminous nature but passed recently, is the Governance Bill.
According to him, “The Governance Bill is the father of all of them. So, we have passed the governance bill, we are now saying, we will pass the Administration, Local Community and the Fiscal. The Local Community is the most contentious.
“We are in the process of passing three other petroleum industry bills. That is the Administration bill, the Host Community and the Fiscal bill. And I am handling the fiscal personally by myself because that is where the money is.
“I mean everything that will bring money to this country; it is in the fiscal bill that it will be regulated. So, I am saying my other colleagues can help with other two, the administration and the local community. I am a Chartered Accountant; I will understand it more than most of my colleagues. That is why I am handling that personally.
“We want to run as fast as if we can to finish all the bills before the end of this year because next year, when politics start, we may not be able to have much concentration as we were doing now.”
On the delay in the passage of the bill by the House of Representatives, Alasoadura said: “Everybody wants to be seen as a hero. They never expected that we will be able to pass PIGB the way we passed it. I mean the people from the House of Representatives. When we did it, they felt we had removed wind from their sail. We just came back from the United States recently and what we went there to do mainly is to look at other three bills.
“The other one has been passed as far as we are concerned and what we have done since the beginning of the Eighth Assembly is when one of the arms of the National Assembly passes a bill, the other arm does what we call concurrent. When the bill is sent to them, they raised a committee on their own to look at what we have done, look at the areas they think they have issues and raise it with us and concur. So that is what we expect from them.”
The senator warned that the oil sector, which is the mainstay of the nation’s economy, would soon be irrelevant. He stressed that the leadership of the country must step up its efforts to utilize the oil resources urgently for infrastructural development and prosperity of the nation in all ramifications.
Alasoadura said the nation’s oil might be like the coal of the past because people of the world are trying to move away from petroleum, adding that unless the country taps it now and use it well, it will just be there like that of our bitumen in the next 10 years.
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