TIMIPRE Sylva, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum says the new draft of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) sent to the National Assembly would not scrap the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) rather, the corporation would be commercialised.
Sylva said this when answering questions from journalists at the National Assembly after an interactive session with the leadership of the National Assembly.
“We have heard so much noise about NNPC being scrapped but that is not being envisaged by the bill at all, NNPC will not be scrapped but commercialised in line with deregulation move being made across all the streams in the sector comprising of upstream, downstream and midstream,” the Minister stated.
According to him, the new PIB would create competition in the petroleum sector while it would also be beneficial to the host communities.
He added that the industry would be transformed and the Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEF) and the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) would not exist in the same form that they currently exist.
Sylva stated that the only new thing in the bill is the development of the pipeline sector for the midstream industry that would manage pipelines.
“We have said that NNPC will be commercialised. “But if you are talking about transforming the industry, the only new thing that we are introducing is the development of the midstream, that is the pipeline sector.
“So we have provided robustly for the growth of the midstream sector but I don’t want to go into the details of the bill until it is read on the floor of the Senate,” he noted.
Lukman Abolade is an Investigative reporter with The ICIR. Reach out to him via [email protected], on twitter @AboladeLAA and FB @Correction94