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The Policy Alert and Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Nigeria has launched #WetinWeGain campaign to enhance adequate disclosures of oil, gas and mining transactions in the country.
The campaign would also empower the people of host communities with adequate and accurate information to ask the right questions so as to fully benefit from their natural resources.
Lamenting the poor management, operational capacity and corruption in Nigeria’s oil, gas and mineral subsector the group maintained that the country has witnessed a massive hemorrhage of assets and revenues over the last six decades.
Its Executive Director, Tijah Bolton-Akpan, in a statement in Abuja said rather than the country’s natural resources contributing to prosperity for Nigerians, the nation has witnessed a downward slide in all development indicators.
Citing a 2018 data World Poverty Clock, he lamented that the latest disturbing revelation was that Nigeria now leads countries with the highest poverty burden, with an estimated 87 million Nigerians living in extreme poverty.
“This campaign will use data analysis and simplification, public sensitisation, community capacity building and advocacy to drive home messages that can propel action and help us begin to reverse the resource curse, a phenomenon that sees resource-rich countries trailing behind on most development indicators,” he stated.
National Coordinator Publish What You Pay (PWYP) Nigeria, Peter Egbule said: “Corruption undermines the potential for revenues to be used for improving the socio-economic lives of citizens, particularly resource-rich communities, who suffer loss of livelihoods, destruction of their environment and other deprivations due to the extraction of these resources.
He added that recent developments in the international policy arena have resulted in a lot more extractive data becoming available than was previously possible, but the challenge has been to bridge the gap between extractive data and the utilization of such data by civic actors to demand accountability from governments and companies.
Egbule said the #WetinWeGain Project will help bridge the gap as they partner with Policy Alert on the campaign.
Publish What You Pay UK Coordinator, Miles Litvinoff, welcomed Policy Alert’s launch of the #WetinWeGain campaign saying: “PWYP UK is very pleased to work with Policy Alert and PWYP Nigeria in helping to raise awareness among Nigerian communities about the companies extracting their natural resources and their payments to the Nigerian government.