DEFECTS IN ORONSAYE'S REPORT
Mr. Steve Oronsaye is an illustrious son of Nigeria and a consummate bureaucrat for that matter. The Igbo people of South East have a proverb that says “If a child washes his hands very well, he will dine with kings”. This powerful proverb simply means that hard work, resilience and principled dedication to a given task will surely bring about meaningful dividends for the person concerned. In this sense, it is noteworthy to state without any fear of contradiction that Mr. Steve Oronsaye indeed excelled in his task in the public service so much so that his fatherland elevated him to the peak of his profession whereby he was made the Head of service by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo. Since retiring from the public service, Mr. Oronsaye has been assigned with high profile jobs by the Federal government with specific goal of achieving comprehensive reforms and transformation of the public service.
Eight months ago or thereabout, President Good luck Jonathan set up a Presidential Committee on the rationalization and restructuring of Federal government parastatals, Commissions and Agencies headed by the former Head of service of the Federation Mr. Oronsaye even as the panel only recently submitted its report with far reaching recommendations which included the recommendation for the reduction in the number of parastatals from the present 263 to 161 while specifically admonishing the federal government to do away with 38 other departments and agencies of government.
The Oronsaye committee anchored her conclusions and recommendation on the fundamental belief that these radical measures if adopted by government can reduce cost of governance and save huge sums of money for the Government and People of Nigeria.
Specifically, the breakdown as published in the 800-page report presented to President Jonathan recently, about N124.8 billion would be save from agencies proposed for abolition; about N100.6 billion from agencies proposed for mergers; about N6.6 billion from professional bodies by way of stopping the annual government subventions; N489.9 billion from universities; N50.9 billion from polytechnics; N32.3 billion from colleges of Education and N616 million from boards of Federal medical centers.
Plausible as this thinking may be in the court of public opinion because of the reported drastic reduction in the cost of running some of these agencies, there are noticeable defects and loop holes in some of the logical arguments advanced by the Steve Oronsaye Committee for the merger and/or scrapping of some agencies of government charged statutorily with some critical thematic mandates.
Apart from the obvious fallacy underlying the call by the Mr. Steve Oronsaye’s Committee for the reduction in the number and funding support to the critical educational sector, the recommendation for the scrapping of the all-important Environmental Watch dog-the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) and its replacement with the grossly incompetent and compromised Department for Petroleum Resources of the Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources is not only laughable but would amount to the fundamental breach of international best practices which requires that every member nation of the United Nation that produces crude oil should have an independent institution to monitor oil spill and work actively to check such monumental environmental degradation.
Another in the series of spectacular blunders contained in the Steve Oronsaye's report is the toxic recommendation for the merger of the vibrant and firebrand Nigerian Television Authority [NTA] with the equally viable Federal Raio Corporation of Nigeria [FRCN].
For the Presidential panel headed by Mr. Oronsaye to even contemplate recommending that an independent (Independent because it is not domiciled in the petroleum ministry) body such as NOSDRA be replaced by a unit in the Federal ministry of petroleum which is another name for the 'corruption-infested' Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is completely unacceptable.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation [recently indicted in the mismanagement of N1.7trillion subsidy fund] which supervises the Department of Petroleum Resources is a joint venture partner with multi-national oil companies that are the major culprits responsible for the environmental degradation and oil spillages.
How do we now allow the department partly guilty for the oil spills to now be the body to detect and respond to oil spills in the oil producing communities? This is like allowing an offensive striker in a football game to shift the goal post at the middle of a match. What a big irony?
As aforementioned, a considerable fundamental defect inherent in the Mr. Oronsaye’s report is the less than professional recommendation that the biggest television conglomerate in Africa-the Nigerian Television Authority be merged with the equally huge Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria.
The reason for the above recommendation does not have strong logic backing it because the Nigerian Television Authority for more than five years has never collected any capital budgetary releases from the Federation Account but has consistently relied on its internally generated Revenue to run the television conglomerate which has a rich tradition as the authentic voice of the government and the people of Nigeria. The Nigerian Television Authority has in recent times begun a monumental expansion project from the internally generated revenue and invariably has binding contractual agreements with multi-national firms among which was the company that up graded much of the broadcast facilities and that are handling these expansion contracts.
Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria is another huge enterprise that is doing so very well and has also recently commenced successful expansion contracts. What will become the fate of these giant strides if these two vibrant Radio and Television Conglomerates are forced into unworkable marriage and by the way what will become the fate of thousands of youth recently employed by the Nigerian Television Authority and posted to the numerous functional stations all across the country? Is it the wish of the federal government to compound the unemployment situation by disengaging these thousands of university graduates NTA gave employment during the current Dr. Goodluck Jonathan’s federal administration? Does the President expect to rubbish a salient legacy his government has achieved by downsizing these thousands of youth that the NTA gave employment during this administration? God forbid!
The Steve Oronsaye’s committee did a very poor job by recommending the scrapping and/or merging of the National oil spill Detection and Response Agency and its replacement with the Department for Petroleum Resources. This recommendation is fundamentally faulty and must be discarded for the reason that it was not well thought out and that it was pure sentiment that guided the birth of this recommendation rather than logical reason.
For instance, Mr. Oronsaye, who is a successful Accountant but not an Environmentalist may have been guided by sentiment when he stated thus; “In the Environmental sector, the committee observed that the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency was created to perform a function already assigned by law to the Department of Petroleum Resources. The continued existence of NOSDRA was tantamount to paying huge salaries to persons who do nothing but wait for spills to occur. This is despite the fact that there is a standard operating procedure for oil companies in Nigeria to clean up oil spill whenever it occurs”.
The above reason is not only illogical and laughable but it is like saying that government should close down the hospitals because the medical workers are doing nothing but wait for people to become sick before their expertise are sought. It is also not true to say that NOSDRA has done nothing since inception.
At a recent interaction with leaders of the civil society with the Federal minister of Environment we were told that the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency has completed the Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) maps of Nigeria Coastal lines from Badagry to Calabar, stretching 50 kilometers inland for the purpose of guiding and ensuring appropriate response mechanism required for different environmentally sensitive areas in the event of oil spill.
We gather that the project which commenced in 2007 captured the sensitivity ranking of Nigerian coastline from Badagry to Calabar 50 kilometers inland to determine the degree of sensitivity of the areas to oil spill incidents and to serve as a base-map for reviewing and updating the National oil spill contingency plan (NOSCP). The Environmental sensitivity index map was successfully launched by the erstwhile Environment minister Mr. John Odey on June 1 2010 in the presence of environmental stakeholders.
Our investigation shows that the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency regularly conducts visits to oil companies for the purpose of facilities inspection even as it also ensures that all existing environmental standards and regulations are complied with in the installation and maintenance of the offshore and onshore oil facilities.
The fact is that the creation of NOSDRA was in compliance with international best practices because Nigeria not being an Island must follow international benchmarks on the cleaning up of the environment by not appointing oil companies known as violators to become the same body to shout out loudly that they have caused oil spills. In the United States of America, the appropriate authority for the detection of crude oil spills is the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) similar to NOSDRA in Nigeria.
Besides, it was because it was determined to tackle the challenges of oil spillage in the country that the Federal Government and other relevant stakeholders had met in different fora to deliberate on how to review the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan (NOSCP) with a view to ensuring preparedness and prompt and effective response to the ugly incidents. The outcome of such series of deliberations was the approval of the NOSCP of 2003, which was later backed by an Act passed by the National Assembly in 2005 and signed into law by former President Olusegun Obasanjo on October 18, 2006. The Act, which was published in the Federal Republic of Nigeria Official Gazette, No. 72, volume 93 of December 29, 2006 as Act No. 15, led to the establishment of National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA).
The enabling Act setting up the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) empowers the body to do damage assessment to give an unbiased deal on the issue of compensation to the affected communities where oil spillage occurs especially if such are not trigged by third party interference. Section II (c) of the oil pipelines Act, of 1969 specifies that there is no compensation if third party interference is traced as the cause of oil spill.
The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency is the most credible body to play the role of the coordinating body for the control of oil spills in Nigeria and not the Department for Petroleum Resources. President Jonathan should not rely on aspects of this Mr. Steve Oronsaye's report to draw the hand of the clock backwards especially in the Environmental and media sectors of the economy.
Both the Nigerian Television Authority and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria have credible historical origins that are distinct and so do not qualify in the class of those agencies that should be merged except and unless it is the wish of government to use sledge hammer to kill two very professionally competent broadcasting firms that have always operated as vibrant organizations in their own right. If the federal government is misguided by the Oronsaye’s committee to kill these two media enterprises, then posterity will not forgive the President Jonathan as the one that presided over the willful killing of media freedom even when a major achievement of this government is the signing into law of the freedom of information Act of 2011.
Wikipedia, the free online Encyclopedia recorded that historically, NTA was inaugurated in 1977 while the Federal Radio corporation of Nigeria has been in operation successfully since 1933.
Written By Miss. Nwamaka Asuzu