PIB to pass by March 2018: senator

The Nigerian senate expects to pass all four parts of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) in Q1 2018, local media reported Tuesday.

“At the pace which we are going, we should be done in the Senate with all the parts of the PIB hopefully by the first quarter of next year. We also expect that it will not be delayed in the House of Representatives and the Presidency,” Senator Gershom Bassey, the vice-chairman of the Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources (Upstream), said. 


“All stakeholders have been involved in bringing the bill to the stage where it is now. We expect the process to be fast and all-inclusive,” he added, speaking at the opening of the Annual International Conference and Exhibition of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists.

Last month, the chairman of the Petroleum Resources Committee (Downstream) of the House of Representatives said the lower chamber plans to pass the PIB by July 2018. First drafted in 2007, the PIB has been stuck in the legislative apparatus for the past decade. It has been divided into three parts – governance, fiscal, administration and community – to facilitate passage.  In May 2017, the upper house passed the governance section of the bill.

The country’s hydrocarbons industry is still largely governed and regulated by the Petroleum Act of 1969, which the government has been trying to replace with the PIB.