Critical Legal Issues in State Participation in the Oil Business in Nigeria: Any Success?

Abstract

Since the finding of oil and independence in Nigeria in the 1960s, State participation in the oil business has been tremendous ranging from the enactment of state ownership of oil legal regimes to the creation of national oil companies and refineries. Change in the ideological climate of ownership due to the end of the cold war has equally underscored renewed incursion of multinational oil companies into the oil business with a variety of joint venture and production-sharing contracts with the national oil company: NNPCL. Further opening of the gates for local content development has also seen the emergence of local content vehicles and private refineries on the Nigerian oil business landscape. This study which employs the doctrinal method critically surveys the international and municipal dynamics that resulted in State ownership theories of minerals, the resource conflicts wars and corruption they have bred and the pernicious tenacity with which multinational oil companies have remained relevant on the oil business landscape without any demonstrable contribution in the downstream sector and gas-flare-down. The study equally underscores the circumstances in which the seven sisters have underpinned and shoved the Nigerian state into blurred privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation policies. The study finds that the participation of the State in business has neither grown the economy by meeting the energy requirement of the people through state refineries nor has it employed its legislative management to get the multinationals to do so through private refineries. What the nation has harvested is a basket of corruption, poverty and underdevelopment concluding that State participation in the oil business has been a failure.