By Moses Patience Chat
The Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre (YEAC) in Nigeria has said that industry regulators of oil spills and gas flaring are weak, ill-prepared and underfunded to checkmate and sanction faulting oil multinationals companies.
This is as the Chairman of the Governing Board of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), Shehu Chindo Yamusa, recently charged oil multinationals to strictly comply with extant laws, regulations and guidelines on environmental management in the petroleum industry.
Responding to the charge by NOSDRA, the Executive Director (ED) of YEAC-Nigeria, Mr Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, urged industry regulators to reassess themselves to find out why Nigerian laws were not being respected by oil multinationals, as obtainable in other parts of the world including the Gulf of Mexico in the United States during the 2010 oil spill.
According to Fyneface, NOSDRA is poorly funded, lacks logistics equipment, well-equipped and standard laboratories and necessary independence to properly monitor and regulate the activities of multinational oil companies to comply with extant laws, regulations and guidelines on environmental management and practices in the oil and gas industry.
“For NOSDRA to respond to an oil spill incident through Joint Investigation Visits (JIV), the polluting oil companies are involved in the provision of logistics before such visits to the creeks are made possible and you should wonder the type of JIV report that would come out of a process funded by the multinational oil company on whose facility the oil spill incident occurred.
“In most of the cases, such logistical support incidents always ended up compelling the NOSDRA team to dance to the tune of the IOCs, blaming the spills on third party interference to enable them dodge both the payment of compensation and cleanup.”
He maintained that Nigeria’s problem was not lack of laws, regulations and guidelines on environmental management in the petroleum industry but ability of the institutions which he described as “weak” to ensure that both the IOCs and indigenous companies comply with the extant laws.
“For the country to be able hold oil multinationals to strictly comply with extant laws, regulations and guidelines on environmental management in the petroleum industry, NOSDRA and the Federal Ministry of Environment must sit up in their regulatory and response functions.”
Fyneface further urged the Federal Government to properly fund NOSDRA and other related Ministries, Departments and Agencies while the judiciary must ensure the diligent prosecution of cases, violations and non-compliance to extant laws, regulations and guidelines by both multinational and indigenous companies in the oil and gas sector.