The Petroleum Industry Act (PIA): Not a raw deal, By Aniebo Nwamu

Before the start of World War II, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government implemented “The New Deal” to bail Americans out of the Great Depression. Nigeria’s “New Deal” is likely to emerge from the ashes of a raw deal. The PIA is not a raw deal perhaps. But I don’t see it regaining the “$50bn worth of investments” lost in the past decade to delays, as President Buhari declared…

But has the long wait really ended? Procrastination is the thief of time. Even after the PIA’s enactment, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, told us that fuel subsidy and the current pump price of petrol would stay “for now”. In other words, the government won’t obey its own law “for now”. A pronouncement by President Buhari wasn’t emphatic either.

Deregulation or liberalisation was a pillar of the Structural Adjustment Programme introduced by the General Ibrahim Babangida regime in the 1980s, but the policymakers chose to whitewash a fraud, while killing Nigerians in instalments. Although the military leaders then told us they had rejected a loan of the International Monetary Fund , they still accepted the global financial institution’s conditionalities through the backdoor. Corruption stepped in to distort SAP’s implementation.

Nonetheless, I believe in market forces, the vagaries of demand and supply. In 1987, we thought all hell had been let loose as the dollar exchanged for N10. A few years later, it hit N22. Nobody dreamed it would ever reach N160. But it did – and that was the rate at which the current government met it in 2015. I don’t know the rate today, but the rumour is that a dollar fetches more than N500.

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