Nigeria Fails to Meet Deadline for Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
Posted by jinn on March 9th, 2010
"A child is silhouetted against a gas flare Nigeria's southwest delta: 80% of the country's oil wealth goes to 1% of its population." Caption: Guardian UK; Photograph: Reuters/Corbis
Today, March 9, marked the deadline for Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Candidate countries to complete “validation” by reporting to the EITI secretariat in Oslo. Nigeria is one of 20 countries that failed to complete validation of its efforts to comply with the EITI. In 2008, a total of 22 EITI Candidate countries were given the March 9, 2010 deadline.
Nigeria was the first country to give domestic legal force to the EITI when it passed national legislation in May 2007. Nigeria became an EITI Candidate country in September 2007 and was given until today to complete validation, a necessary step for progressing from an EITI Candidate country to an EITI Compliant country. Validation provides an independent assessment of progress achieved and identifies measures needed to strengthen the EITI process.
Nigeria submitted a draft validation report but nonetheless failed to meet the deadline. If faced with “exceptional and unforeseeable circumstances,” EITI Candidate countries can request an extension from the EITI Board, which will meet in mid-April to consider these requests.
If a Candidate country does complete validation (or request an extension) by March 9, 2010, it will be delisted.
To become an EITI Candidate country, Nigeria had to meet the four requisite sign-up indicators: the government issued an unequivocal public statement of its intention to implement EITI, committed to work with civil society and companies on EITI implementation, appointed a senior individual to lead on EITI implementation, and published and made widely available a detailed work plan with measurable targets, a timeline, and an assessment of capacity constraints.
In 2006, a report was published identifying several weaknesses pertaining to the management of oil revenues and governance in the oil and gas sector, based on set of audits conducted from 1999-2004. This report led to the creation of remediation action plan, as well as to the release in 2009 of a second report that reviewed 2005 activities. The 2009 report ”showed financial discrepancies and outstanding payments totaling over US$5bn for oil and gas revenues generated by the sector in 2005″ and ”identified unprecedented financial discrepancies, mispaid taxes, and system inefficiencies [including o]ver US$ 800 million of unresolved differences between what companies said that they paid…and what the governments said it received were identified.” A report covering activities from 2006-2008 has been commissioned.
Read more about the EITI in general and the EITI in Nigeria.