After being derelict for 16 months in its responsibility to activate the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) Act, the government yesterday tabled a wholly unacceptable bill in the National Assembly that must be withdrawn and recomposed.
Not only is this bill, the Natural Resource Fund Bill 2021 a coruscating example of the mountain having laboured to produce a dud, its toxicity is insidious. In part it seeks to replace oversight of the Fund by a “Board of Directors” which clearly will be handpicked by the PPP/C from among its followers and handmaidens in the private sector and elsewhere. The configuration proposed will ensconce the country’s earnings from oil and gas in the laps of a select few of the PPP/C’s adherents.
As had been suspected by many, the PPP/C government has talked a lot but openness, transparency and unity but its hypocrisy is off the charts. Having said it will not seek political and ministerial control of the Fund, in its current form it does exactly that with this bill. Having said that it will be careful in expenditure of oil monies it plans to empty the fund in the first year of its operation.
Nothing short of a bipartisan parliamentary agreement on the NRF can be acceptable. Nothing short of credible personages at the helm of the fund, whether from here or abroad, will be acceptable. This is a shoddy bit of legal drafting that does not even say how the “Board of Directors” will be chosen. What is the government doing with all of the supposedly expert advice it has been cultivating and drawing loans and grants to facilitate?
President Ali’s government has been sufficiently opaque on the oil and gas sector to raise concerns about its intent. Its needs an urgent recalibration of its trajectory and a good start will be made with the canning of this bill.
