Former Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Mrs Ifueko Omoigui-Okauru, says delay in the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) will continue to discourage investment in Nigeria’s oil sector.
“When you keep things hanging in the balance, you are not encouraging investors to come in as they don’t know really what law you operate,” she said in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Nairobi, Kenya.
She argued that although the PIB would not end to all the problems in the Nigeria’s oil sector, it was important to keep moving rather than wait for when all sections of the bill would get passed.
“I know that from all the work that went into it while I was there and all the work that went into it after I left; the intention is to address issues.
“But there is no law that will be perfect. The first rule of reform is to keep going: this means that you may need to discard things that are right for now and get consensus on the few that everybody gets consensus on.
“That way you can make progress, and then you come round again and carry more people. You just have to keep going.
“If we stay stuck because we want a perfect law, we know that for the next 20 years there will be no law.
“So I believe that whatever law will be passed will make us move on.
“Then another set of legislators will come and improve on it but we need to at least pass the law so that we give clarity and certainty to the oil sector as to what exactly is our law,” she said.
NAN reports that Omoigui-Okauru was in Nairobi as a panelist at the just concluded Pan African Conference on curbing Illicit Financial Flows from Africa.
At the conference, it was established that Africa loses over $50 billion from activities of multinational companies who engage in illicit activities especially in the Extractive industry.