PIA: CODE Push for Domestication of FoI Act in Rivers

Blessing Ibunge in Port Harcourt

An organisation, Connected Development (CODE) has called for the domestication of Freedom of Information (FoI) Act in Rivers State and other parts of the country where it is yet to be domesticated.

The call was made yesterday, at a town hall meeting organised by CODE, with support from OXFAM, for Host Community Development Trust Fund (HCDT), in Port Harcourt.

The FoI Act was signed into law in 2011 by former President Goodluck Jonathan, with aims to promote transparency and accountability in governance.

The Act gives a person or organisation the right to access information from government agencies, the federal civil service, private and public organisations providing public services.

While states like Imo, Anambra, Kaduna, Akwa Ibom, Edo, Osun, Ogun and others have domesticated the act, Rivers State and few other states are yet to localise the law.

In his presentation at the programme, Charles Uffort, Rivers State supporter of Connected Development, told the participants, other individuals, groups to seek for the domestication of the FoI Act for easy access to documents from the government and corporate organisation.

Noting that communities are yet to clearly understand their positions in the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), Uffort stated that with free access to FoI act, the people in the state can be able to get some of the government and oil companies documents for knowledge and proper demands.

“We push for the domestication of the FoI Act, because it helps the host communities to get information, be it from the government or oil companies. It will give communities the knowledge of actual budgets meant for projects in their communities and it will be honoured by all.

“Our call now is to ask the community members and the state to make sure all the states including the Federal Capital Territory, domesticate the law. Some states have domesticated it while some have not, including Rivers State. So, we are asking citizens of the state to join their voices in calling on the government to make sure that it’s domesticated”.

Speaking on the meeting, Uffort said “We noticed that there are so many loopholes four years down, so many persons don’t understand the implications of the PIA and the regulatory body is also not helping matters – that’s the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), because they are regulating the PIA.

Many communities mostly fall back to the civil societies to give them the lead way and that’s why we have been organising town hall meetings, trainings, dialogues and focal group discussions with the community members to highlight most of the key points including how to inaugurate their boards, advisory committees and others to be able to access their funds because we are no longer operating of GMOU.”

Uffort further noted that PIA has come to stay which the communities leverage on how to run their sustainable activities and to carry out any project they want.  “They can be able to finance it by themselves with what they got from the oil companies exploring in their communities”.

He regretted that “the oil companies operating in the communities are the ones worsening the situation because they are not adhering to the PIA and that’s why we are engaging community members at all levels to build their capacity on the best approach to engage the oil companies in their communities”.

He added: “We want the communities to have the basic knowledge on the best approach on how to access their funds because the 3% dderivation money that they are given is big but so many people don’t understand and to see how complex it is. So that’s why we are building their capacities and making them understand the basic things so that we can be able to hold these people accountable, especially the oil companies”.

Also, in presentation on the theme: “Powers of Voices Partnership – Fair for All,” Dr Augustine Okere, Lead Research, Connected Development, said the HCDT’s were sensitised on how to start thinking from the perspective of amplifying their voices using strategies within the media including social and conventional media.

Speaking of their expectation, Okere said “At the end of this programme, what we are looking at is to have HCDT telling their stories from their perspective within the context of the PIA, within their engagement with multinationals, stakeholders and government agencies”.

He stressed the need for communities “to tell more stories and the more they tell the stories, the more people will know about it, the more people will understand the need and why PIA should maybe be adjusted or improved upon and more HCDTs will come up and more communities benefit”.

One of the stakeholders at the meeting, Dr. Sophia Daniels, noted the importance of community-based people to understand the use of the media in storytelling and how they would advocate for development for their different communities in a more diplomatic way which wouldn’t bring any form of aggression to whoever they want to draw their attention to.

Dr. Daniels, Deputy Director, Prof. Onuchukwu Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), stressed the need for people to understand how to engage with the media in pushing development to their communities.