was at his meeting with civil society groups and the media where he acknowledged Nigeria’s progress. He said the country’s achievements so far put her in a unique class among the 52 EITI member countries.PT: Since you arrived in Nigeria, you have been holding meetings with several government officials and agencies. What’s your assessment of Nigeria’s progress in the EITI process?Today is the one year anniversary since I took up this role as Head of the International Secretariat.
I have been pestering the NEITI Secretariat ever since I was appointed to arrange a visit to Nigeria. Quite understandably, this will be a good time to come. We were waiting for the elections and the formation of a new government. So, it’s been a good and intense 24 hours in Nigeria. And now we have the time to hear from civil society because civil society, in the EITI, is one of three legs that sustains this initiative.
Of course, I do not need to tell you how important the contribution civil society makes to our overall effort globally and here in Nigeria. But, we do believe that the work we undertake is significantly against corruption. The data we generate and make available to the media and others who are interested and wish to join in tackling pernicious problems should be a central part of our effort.
So, the activities of EITI both in Nigeria and globally contribute to generating resources to the public’s agenda, to in turn be translated into priority expenditures for citizens of the EITI countries. We know the sector has huge potentials for growth and will in the future make significant contribution to the resource base in Nigeria, alongside the oil and gas sector.
That’s why I said you are a vital leg of the EITI mechanism. We have some of the unique scales with which we operate our multi-stakeholder process. For the other role civil society plays, apart from holding decision-makers and companies to account, it gets information out to the citizens. That includes people who are far away from the capital city where the actions take place in a federation like Nigeria, but also equally men and women in that conversation.
We have some important new commitments and requirements that are mandatory. The most salient is on contract transparency between governments and companies.This spells out the terms of contracts, royalties, and payments of fees by companies to government. It’s a mutual commitment between government and companies in the contractual form in the public domain.
I ready applaud the fact that in Nigeria you will be releasing on December 12 the first Beneficial Ownership Register for the Extractive Sector. The third area of priority is on commodity trading. This is a complex technical area. It is all about the sales and movement of cargoes of oil, gas and minerals; an important revenue earner for the country; one that has not always been a special area for transparency.
The last thing I want to talk about is systematic disclosure or mainstreaming. In Nigeria, there has been a lot of thinking and practice to mainstream EITI data. It will be the role of civil society to ensure that happens. If that data becomes more accessible and more timely, it also should be in a form that could be sent out to a large number of ordinary people.
So, in giving Satisfactory Status to Nigeria, the EITI indeed recognises real progress that has been made. But at the same time, if one looks at the detail of the corrective actions that need to be done, there is quite a long way to go. There are important reports showing the illegal removal of oil resources, which has cost the economy big. These are real achievements that must be applauded. I am confident that NEITI can build further on that.
That has huge potential to demonstrate real intent of dialogue and openness about what the remaining corrective actions and the opportunities of mainstreaming through open data.
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