Eight months ago, President Goodluck Jonathan set up a Presidential Committee on the Rationalization and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies headed by the former Head of service of the Federation, Mr Oronsaye and only recently submitted its report with far reaching recommendations. These included the recommendation for the reduction in the number of parastatals from the present 263 to 161 while specifically admonishing the federal government to do away with 38 other departments and agencies of government.
The Oronsaye committee anchored its conclusion on the need to reduce cost of governance. Specifically, the breakdown as published in the 800-page report presented to President Jonathan recently, about N124.8 billion would be saved from agencies proposed for scrapping among other savings. Plausible as this thinking may be in the court of public opinion because of the reported drastic reduction in the cost of running some of these agencies, there are noticeable defects and loop holes in some of the logical arguments advanced by the Steve Oronsaye Committee for the merger and/or scrapping of some agencies of government charged statutorily with some critical thematic mandates.
Apart from the obvious fallacy underlying the call by the Mr Steve Oronsaye’s Committee for the reduction in the number and funding support to the critical educational sector, the recommendation for the scrapping of the all-important Environmental Watch dog-the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) and its replacement with the grossly incompetent and compromised Department for Petroleum Resources of the Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources is not only laughable but would amount to the fundamental breach of international best practices which requires that every member nation of the United Nation that produces crude oil should have an independent institution to monitor oil spill and work actively to check such monumental environmental degradation.
Another in the series of spectacular blunders contained in the Oronsaye report is the toxic recommendation for the merger of the vibrant and firebrand Nigerian Television Authority [NTA] with the equally viable Federal Raio Corporation of Nigeria [FRCN].
For the Presidential panel headed by Mr Oronsaye to even contemplate recommending that an independent (Independent because it is not domiciled in the petroleum ministry) body such as NOSDRA be replaced by a unit in the Federal ministry of petroleum which is another name for the ‘corruption-infested’ Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is completely unacceptable.
NNPC [recently indicted in the mismanagement of N1.7trillion subsidy fund] which supervises the Department of Petroleum Resources is a joint venture partner with multi-national oil companies that are the major culprits responsible for the environmental degradation and oil spillages.
How do we now allow the department partly guilty for the oil spills to now be the body to detect and respond to oil spills in the oil producing communities? This is like allowing an offensive striker in a football game to shift the goal post at the middle of a match. What a big irony?
As aforementioned, a considerable fundamental defect inherent in the Mr Oronsaye’s report is the less than professional recommendation that the biggest television conglomerate in Africa-the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, be merged with the equally huge Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, FRCN.
The reason for the above recommendation does not have strong logic backing it because the NTA for more than five years has never collected any capital budgetary releases from the Federation Account but has consistently relied on its internally generated Revenue to run the television conglomerate which has a rich tradition as the authentic voice of the government and the people of Nigeria. The NTA has in recent times begun a monumental expansion project from the internally generated revenue and invariably has binding contractual agreements with multi-national firms among which was the company that up graded much of the broadcast facilities and that are handling these expansion contracts. FRCN is another huge enterprise that is doing so very well and has also recently commenced successful expansion contracts. What will become the fate of these giant strides if these two vibrant radio and television conglomerates are forced into unworkable marriage and by the way what will become the fate of thousands of youth recently employed by the NTA and posted to the numerous functional stations all across the country? Is it the wish of the federal government to compound the unemployment situation by disengaging these thousands of university graduates NTA gave employment during the current Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s federal administration?
The Steve Oronsaye’s committee did a very poor job by recommending the scrapping and/or merging of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) and its replacement with the Department for Petroleum Resources (DPR). This recommendation is fundamentally faulty and must be discarded for the reason that it was not well thought out and that it was pure sentiment that guided the birth of this recommendation rather than logical reason.
For instance, Mr Oronsaye was guided by sentiment when he stated thus; “In the Environmental sector, the committee observed that the NOSDRA was created to perform a function already assigned by law to the DPR. The continued existence of NOSDRA was tantamount to paying huge salaries to persons who do nothing but wait for spills to occur. This is despite the fact that there is a standard operating procedure for oil companies in Nigeria to clean up oil spill whenever it occurs”.
The above reason is not only illogical and laughable but it is like saying that government should close down the hospitals because the medical workers are doing nothing but wait for people to become sick before their expertise are sought. It is also not true to say that NOSDRA has done nothing since inception.
At a recent interaction with leaders of the civil society with the Federal minister of Environment we were told that the NOSDRA has completed the Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) maps of Nigeria Coastal lines from Badagry to Calabar, stretching 50 kilometres inland for the purpose of guiding and ensuring appropriate response mechanism required for different environmentally sensitive areas in the event of oil spill.
Our investigation shows that the NOSDRA regularly conducts visits to oil companies for the purpose of facilities inspection even as it also ensures that all existing environmental standards and regulations are complied with in the installation and maintenance of the offshore and onshore oil facilities.
The fact is that the creation of NOSDRA was in compliance with international best practices because Nigeria not being an Island must follow international benchmarks on the cleaning up of the environment by not appointing oil companies known as violators to become the same body to shout out loudly that they have caused oil spills. In the United States of America, the appropriate authority for the detection of crude oil spills is the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) similar to NOSDRA in Nigeria.
The NOSDRA Act empowers the body to do damage assessment to give an unbiased deal on the issue of compensation to the affected communities where oil spillage occurs especially if such are not trigged by third party interference. Section II (c) of the oil pipelines Act, of 1969 specifies that there is no compensation if third party interference is traced as the cause of oil spill.
Asuzu is with the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria.
