Nigeria’s leading environmental pressure group, The Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria ERA/ FoEN, is the latest amongst several others who are rejecting the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, of three percent derivation for host communities.
The National Assembly had last week passed the PIB bill that will allow host communities allocated just three percent, a development that have generated chains of reactions from oil producing States.
However, ERA, is seeking that both chambers of the National Assembly should immediately harmonize and produce a people’s friendly oriented bill.
The Executive Director of ERA/FoEN, Dr. Godwin Uyi Ojo In a press statement signed and made available to newsmen in Benin City, believes the National Assembly failed to do justice to the bill despite pending since 2008.
Amongst other things, Dr Uyi Ojo in the statement, is also demanding the provision for allocation of the 30 percent frontier oil exploration to be invested in renewable energy development, to provide improved energy access to citizens, given the deplorable state of the national electricity grid.
While expressing total dissatisfaction over the three percent allocation for host communities due to the ecological dislocation of the region, culminating in the appalling level of pollution of agricultural land, fisheries, and drinking water, Dr. Uyi Ojo is clamoring for the allocation of at least 10% to the host communities.
Ojo emphasized the need for the Federal Government to consider the PIB as one of its efforts to address the numerous challenges of unsustainable environmental practices which have taken its toll through environmental degradation and destruction of livelihoods of the Niger Delta region for several decades.