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”.
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