Four years after the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) promised a new era of accountability in Nigeria’s oil sector, host communities are still counting losses—financial, environmental, and human. The staggering revelation by the House Committee on South-South Development Commission (SSDC) that oil companies have failed to implement key provisions of the law is not just a regulatory lapse; it is a betrayal of the spirit of the PIA and an affront to the people whose lands continue to bleed crude and anguish.
According to Committee Chairman, Rep. Julius Pondi, the Abandonment and Decommissioning Fund alone should have accrued between N850 billion and N1.1 trillion, while the Environmental Remediation Fund should by now hold at least N420 billion to N550 billion. These are not abstract numbers. They represent poisoned rivers that should have been cleaned, devastated farmlands that should have been restored, and communities that should finally have begun to recover from decades of environmental abuse.
Instead, multinational oil firms have continued to operate as though the PIA were optional—shifting liabilities to the same people whose lands power the nation’s economy, while regulators look on with disturbing passivity. This is not just negligence; it is exploitation coated with impunity.
The consequences are visible everywhere across the Niger Delta: rusting and abandoned installations posing grave safety risks; children growing up on contaminated water; farmers watching their harvests shrink in toxic soil; fishermen pursuing ghosts in once-thriving creeks now barren from pollution. These are realities the PIA was crafted to change. Yet, four years on, the law remains largely unimplemented—its transformative promise squandered by corporate nonchalance and regulatory inertia.
The failures of both the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) and the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) are equally damning. Their lack of visibility, capacity, and urgency in enforcing compliance has emboldened operators to sidestep their statutory obligations. A law without enforcement is a mere decoration; the agencies meant to police the sector have instead become spectators, leaving host communities to bear the lifelong consequences of environmental ruin.
It is no surprise, then, that lawmakers are now contemplating a new agency to manage these funds—one that is transparent, functional, and immune to regulatory capture. If the existing institutions cannot compel compliance with the most basic provisions of the PIA, then Nigeria must reconsider who is fit to safeguard its environmental and community interests.
The oil firms must be held to account. They cannot continue extracting wealth while abandoning waste; cannot keep appropriating profit while externalising pollution. Nigeria cannot afford another chapter of environmental injustice masquerading as industrial activity. The time for indulgent excuses is long past.
The House of Representatives must move beyond lamentation. It must compel full compliance with the PIA—through sanctions, audits, and, where necessary, criminal proceedings. Host communities have waited too long for justice, and the cost of further delay is measured in lost lives, ruined livelihoods, and ecosystems that may never recover.
The PIA was meant to correct decades of imbalance. Its non-implementation is becoming yet another symbol of the exploitation it sought to end. Oil companies must obey the law. Regulators must wake up. And Nigeria must insist that environmental justice is not a request—it is a right.
