By Energy Worth
OrderPaper Advocacy Initiative has disclosed its plans to convene a colloquium on the Petroleum Host and Impacted Community Development Bill (PHICDB). The Programme Executive of the group, Mej John Obada, disclosed this in a statement. He said the meeting would discuss issues around ongoing legislative and policy reforms in the petroleum industry, as they relate to communities in the country.
The HOSTCOM colloquium will hold at the Sheraton Hotel Abuja on July 12, 2018. He said the meeting is targeted at stakeholders in affected communities in the northern parts of the country.
The objective of this forum is to aggregate the views/positions of the region on general industry reforms, as they relate specifically to the PHICDB. The Chief Whip of the House of Representatives and Chairman of the Ad-hoc Committee on the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), Alhassan Doguwa, will chair the technical session.
Minister of the Environment, Ibrahim Usman Jibril, and Chairman, Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream), Kabir Marafa, are expected to deliver papers at the colloquium. Among those expected to attend the conference are members of the National Assembly, the Executive, and representatives of state governments in the northern region.
Other participants are the academia, relevant industry players, corporate organisations, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), security agencies and representatives of host-communities of petroleum and gas infrastructure, as well as community-based organisations (CBOs).
Obada added that the objective is to identify misconceptions, misunderstanding, misinformation and lacunae about the PHICDB, proffer solutions to aid the legislative process, and reduce frictions among stakeholders.
It is being organised as part of the Growth Initiatives for Fiscal Transparency: Oil Industry Lot (GIFT-OIL) Programme of OrderPaper. OrderPaper Advocacy Initiative is a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that is duly registered in Nigeria. The programme executive disclosed that in September 2016, its affiliate, OrderPaper Nigeria, successfully hosted the Gallery Colloquium on Budgetary Reforms in Abuja.
The event attracted participation from top actors and stakeholders in the Executive and Legislative arms of government. He disclosed that OrderPaper Advocacy Initiative is currently implementing ConsTrack, which is a USAID-funded project on tracking of legislators’ constituency projects.
