NEITI’s Job is Not to Make People Happy, but to Do the Right Thing
to clean up and open up the mining sector. It may interest you that the Minister of Mines and Steel Development, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, is the chairman of the NEITI board. The ministry has a roadmap for the development of the mining sector and some of the inputs came from our reports/ recommendations. We are aware of and happy with efforts by the ministry to have a one-stop regulatory commission for the sector, de-risk mining, provide accurate geological data, build a portal that can be accessed all over the world, provide incentives for operators, states and host communities, encouraging processing and value addition, improving security and aggressively marketing Nigeria as viable mining destination.
The NEITI Act gives certain room for prose cut ive actions for economic sabotage, how far have you explored this?
The NEITI Act criminalises certain offences. But they are mostly around not giving us accurate information or not giving us such information on time. There are fines and prison terms. But the law did not give us prosecutorial powers. That’s why we are sometimes called toothless bulldog; that we can only bark and not bite. We have been trying to amend the Act to address this and other issues. As part of that process, we will soon hold a roundtable on 10 years of the NEITI Act. We will look at what we need to add, delete or reword. But power to prosecute is not everything. We also have the power to persuade, to engage and, some will not like this, to name and shame. These are soft powers, but they can be as potent, or even more potent, that the hard power. Recently, we introduced a public ranking of companies and government entities in terms of the timeliness and completeness of their template submission. We could have threatened them. We could have even taken them to court but the matter could be tied up in court forever. Besides the fact that there is no predetermined outcome, some of these entities are better resourced than we are. So what did we do then? We took them to the court of public opinion, providing implicit incentives and sanctions for compliance. You need to see the reaction. Next time we ask for information and give a deadline, I can assure you we will have a better response as those that came tops will want to remain on top and those who fell behind would want to do better. Sometimes, you might not be as powerless as you think, especially if you have clever way of impacting reputation and potentially bottom-line. Another power that we have is the power of partnership. Since we cannot bite, we look for those who can bite. So we are partnering EFCC and others to see how they can use our outputs as inputs for their work.
How is the cooperation and coordination between NE IT I and inter-government agencies/ natural resources-rich state governments?
We work well with other government agencies under different platforms. I will mention two: the Inter-Ministerial Task Team (IMTT) and the Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT). The IMTT is the platform for remedying the institutional gaps highlighted in our audits; while the IATT is coordinating platform for all agencies that have something to do with anti-corruption. We coordinate IMTT and serve as the secretariat of IATT. We engage with state governments on a case-by-case basis. But we are also working with the Nigeria Governors Forum on issues of common interests.
What is the place of NE IT I in the global EITI?
NEITI is the Nigerian chapter of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a coalition of governments, companies and civil society groups for the promotion of prudent, transparent and accountable management of extractive resources. Nigeria joined EITI in 2003 and we started implementation in 2004. Nigeria is seen as one of the leading countries among the 51 EITI-implementing countries that include the US, UK and Germany. Nigeria actually won the best EITI implementing country in 2013. Many countries have come to Nigeria to understudy our EITI implementation. But we are not resting on our oars.
We still have a lot of work to do. We joined EITI to ensure that we use our natural resources more prudently, avoid the negative dimensions of resource dependence, which is widely known as resource curse, and ensure that the generality of our people benefit from these resources. So it is not a public relations stunt. So until we are all able to work together using EITI as one of the instruments to bring about shared and sustainable prosperity to Nigerians, our work is not done.