By Olamilekan FAWAS
The Executive Secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), Mr. Waziri Adio, said in Abuja that Nigeria had had attained above meaningful progress on the EITI Validation index.
TBi Africa reports that EITI is a world body that seeks global standard for the good governance of oil, gas and mineral resources and has 51 member countries.
It validates 33 various requirements including revenue collection and socioeconomic contribution.
Adio, who spoke on the progress NEITI had made at a workshop tagged: “Validation for Media and Civil Society Organisations,” said the EITI would be in Nigeria for the validation exercise from July 16-20.
Validation is an independent evaluation mechanism used by EITI to assess the level of implementation of its principles of transparency, accountability, poverty reduction and good governance in the extractive industry.
The exercise, which holds every two years, has five categories: the no progress, inadequate progress, meaningful progress, satisfactory progress and beyond satisfactory progress stages.
Adio said Nigeria attained the meaningful progress stage in 2016 but would not attain the satisfactory progress stage if it missed a step of any of the requirements.
“Nigeria is the most ambitious of the EITI countries having attained 30 out of 33 requirements. We have done tremendously well, beyond expectation.
“For every requirement, there are different stages a country must scale through and so for a country to get to the satisfactory progress stage, it must pass every step in each requirement.
“It is not that Nigeria has failed or passed the validation. We think we have done very well. We think we’ve met most of the marks but we are not grading ourselves.
“We have the meaningful progress stage without improvement and we have the meaningful progress stage with improvement. Nigeria is on the meaningful progress stage with improvement.
“If a country is on the meaningful progress stage and does not improve the country can be suspended or downgraded to the no progress stage.
“So if we are graded and we make it, we will progress to the satisfactory progress stage,” Adio said.
The NEITI boss said the organisation had achieved many feats in the fight for transparency in the extractive sector.
He said: “I must say no other country pushes the kind of boundaries that we do in Nigeria.
“We are the first to have an EITI law, we are the only country to have a database, we give quarterly reviews to keep issues on the front burners, so we are working hard.
“It is not a pass or fail system but a measure of a journey that shows where you are on that journey. I will say we have done very well. We are not under any threat of suspension at all.
“We are making substantive progress but that is not what the EITI is out to measure.
“They are looking at governance processes, quality control, periodic checks and we have had a free hand in operations. No one interferes with our work or calls us to query what we put out.”
Adio said as at the 2016 validation exercise, only four countries: Philippines, Timor Leste, Mongolia and Senegal reached the satisfactory progress stage.
TBI Africa also reports that no country has attained the beyond satisfactory status on all the requirements.
