Senate Decides On Review Of Product Sharing Contract Act

Senate President, Ahmad Lawan has today said that the Production Sharing Contract Act of 1993 will be reviewed.

This Lawan said while he was declaring open a public hearing which was convened by Senate and House of Representatives Joint Committees on Finance on 2020-2022 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF/FSP).

According to Lawan, the Senate had earlier today discussed the need to review the Act in order to boost revenue for the government.

“For long, Nigeria has been shortchanged and of course, we blame ourselves for that.

“Since the price of crude went beyond 20 dollar, Nigerians should have benefitted from that Act by immediately ensuring that we review that Act, where we would have gotten 50 percent of the increase in the price of crude; and we are talking about billions of dollars,” Lawan said.

The Senate President said it was an opportunity that “we squandered ourselves. The oil companies would have no business telling us to review our laws.”

He further noted that by tommorrow, Thursday, the Senate would take the first reading of the bill so as to amend the  Act and promised that the bill will be accorded expeditious consideration.

“We know that the executive will be on our side. We lost about N350 billion to fund the 2019 budget, because it is not there. And even the N160 billion proposed in the 2020 budget is at risk. So we have to do everything possible to ensure that what is ours as a country comes to us.

“And we are inviting the executive side of government to work with us on this very important Act that we are about to amend.

“We expect that before the budget is passed, this Act would have been amended and signed into law by the President… because we have to fund the 2020 budget properly,” Lawan said.

Earlier, the Senate had reached a resolution on the planned amendment after consideration of a motion titled: “Urgent need to review and recover additional revenue accruable to the government of the Federation from the Production Sharing Contracts pursuant to Section 16 of the Deep Offshore and Inland Basin Production Sharing Contract Act.”