Is Nigeria a poor, or a pathetic country? by Elombah Perspective

The Powerful Forces Against PIB - by Olusegun Adeniyi
Following the passage of the 2013 Appropriation Bill last December, a public commentator, Mr. Igboka Uwadiegwu, wrote: "Nigeria's national budget is 5 trillion Naira? Nigeria is not a poor country then, Nigeria is a miserable country. Five trillion Naira would be something like 33 billion USD or some 25 billion Euros. And this is the national budget of a 52 year old nation of some 160 million people! Now, factor in the endemic corruption and you'll have a nation screwed forever…Taiwan, precisely earned 25 billion USD in 2011 from the sales of only Notebook Computers. South Korea in 2010 joined the clubs of nations earning more than 300 billion USD per year exporting value added finished high tech products. And these are little nations in terms of population and geographical space. On our side, we are drunk and drowning in a freely produced natural product, oil. And this oil is extracted by foreigners. Pathetic!"
The embedded message in Uwadiegwu's summation is that we are unproductive if our national budget (for both recurrent and capital expenditure) is about $33 billion, out of which oil earnings account for roughly 80 percent. Even at that, we have not factored in the loan component that takes a significant percentage of the 2013 budget. But while this is an issue we must deal with another day, it is evident that we do not as yet benefit much from our oil assets. That essentially informed the idea of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) which, in the words of Professor Pat Utomi, "threatens to shake the very foundations of the oil and gas industry in Nigeria". The problem, however, is that after 12 years spanning three different administrations, there are powerful forces now bent on scuttling the passage of the bill which has in itself undergone serious metamorphosis. I can identify three of such forces and before I draw my conclusions, I want to examine some of the fears driving each of these forces.
The first of these three forces is the cartel of Multinational oil companies operating in Nigeria which from the outset never liked the idea of change in the sector. In my book on the Yar'Adua years, there is a chapter on the management of our oil and gas sector. On PIB and the oil companies, I wrote inter alia: "the current operators in Nigeria especially never hid their opposition to the PIB, because it introduces a number of changes to the existing fiscal system governing oil and gas operation in the country. Some of the key changes include the fact that all companies engaged in upstream petroleum operation would be required to pay Company Income Tax. The bill's other creation is the Nigerian Hydrocarbon Tax (NHT), which is a simplified version of Petroleum Profit Tax. When implemented, these would provide for a higher government take for deep offshore fields and marginally higher government take for onshore and shallow waters. .......