Mohammed Shosanya
The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission,has been in over 70 cases in the first seven months of 2024.
The Secretary and Legal Adviser of the commission, Olayemi Anyanechi, who said this during a stakeholders’ consultation on the Alternative Dispute Resolution Centre’s rules of procedure, disclosed that NUPRC was dragged into different cases by various groups or individuals, including host communities.
She emphasized the import of the ADRC,adding that the Nigerian oil and gas industry is very important and can get very contentious .
She disclosed that most of the disputes that arose from the 2020 marginal bid round had been settled out of court, adding that the Petroleum Industry Act also gave room for some cases among host communities.
She added:“With the twilight of the 2020 marginal field bid round, for instance, there were a lot of disputes and we actively engaged those awardees. We sat them down, we settled those disputes, so we kept a lot of disputes out of the courts.
“If you look at the Nigerian courts now, you wouldn’t find a lot of those marginal field bid-round disputes. Quite a lot of them have been settled. With the PIA, host community issues also gave rise to a lot of disputes and it’s understandable. Our host communities feel that the communities have to be developed a bit more.
“So there are a lot of issues that we understand and we have so many cases in court. For instance, the commission this year alone received about 70 cases and we spent so much of the Federal Government’s money defending matters. So for us, it (ADRC) is important to be able to oversee the industry, and to regulate the industry in a more convivial environment,” Anyanechi submitted.
According to her,the Chief Executive Officer of the NUPRC, Gbenga Komolafe, has been working assiduously to make the Alternative Dispute Resolution Centre one that can be a pride of Nigeria and Africa at large.