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President Buhari inaugurates first oil project in Northern Nigeria

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Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, inaugurated the first oil and gas project in the northern part of the country, making it the first time Nigeria will be drilling for oil away from the south which has accounted for decades of production in the African oil giant.

The Kolmani oil field located in Gombe and Bauchi States in the North-East is estimated to have a reserve of over one billion barrels of crude, and according to the Presidency, has attracted “$3 billion in investment aimed at opening an oil refinery, a gas processing unit, a power plant and a fertilizer factory.”

“The successful discovery of the Kolmani Oil and Gas field by Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited and her partners has finally broken the jinx after long efforts to find commercial oil and gas outside the established Niger Delta Basin,” an seater Buhari said at the inauguration.

The discovery of oil and gas in the arid northern region is a welcome development for Nigeria as it will, to a large extent, take away attention and concentration from the Niger Delta region in the South where there have been a lot of environmental degradation and pollution due to the activities of oil companies.

Despite over six decades of oil exploration in the south, most parts of the region are largely impoverished and while the international oil companies and government officials have fed fat on the huge profits generated, majority of the people have continued to live in abject poverty.

The Niger Delta region suffers from pollution and ecological disasters while thousands of the youths have resorted to militancy, piracy and setting up illegal refineries in the swampy creeks, stealing the crude oil from pipelines, refining it and selling it on the black market.

With the discovery of oil in the northeast, many Nigerians are hopeful that massive unemployment in the country will be addressed while the insecurity in the region will be curbed or brought to a reasonable level.

There are also concerns that banditry, kidnapping, terrorism and other criminal activities in the northeast wh in have continued to hamper the smooth mining of gold in Zamfara State which also in the region could affect the running of the oil fields but Buhari has assured that adequate security would be put in place to tackle all forms of criminality in the area.

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Kenya, Uganda settle oil import dispute

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In an effort to patch things up between the two neighbours, Kenya will permit Uganda’s landlocked state oil company to import petroleum products through its port of Mombasa, the country’s energy ministry said on Thursday.

After decades of receiving their cargo through affiliated firms in Kenya, Uganda has been looking for alternative ways to import petroleum products, including through a port in Tanzania. According to Solomon Muyita, a spokesman for Uganda’s ministry of minerals and energy, the first shipment under the new arrangement is scheduled for May.

“Kenya has agreed to give us a licence, UNOC (Uganda National Oil Company) is now free to import through Mombasa,” he said.

According to reports, UNOC would use the Kenya Pipeline Company to transport the goods, so Kenya would still profit from the agreement, according to Kenyan Energy Minister Davis Chirchir.

In 2022, Uganda imported petroleum products valued at $1.6 billion, the majority of which came from the Gulf. Kenya serves as the import gateway for about 90% of the goods.

It declared in November that it would transfer all exclusive petroleum product supply rights to a division of the international energy trader Vitol, which would subsequently supply UNOC.

According to what the government said at the time, using Kenyan companies to import oil had “exposed Uganda to occasional supply vulnerabilities” whereby Ugandan retail companies were viewed as secondary whenever there were supply disruptions changing retail prices.

The two African nations that make up the Great Lakes are partners in a variety of fields, including trade, infrastructure, energy, education, agriculture, and military security.

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No plan to increase taxes, Nigeria’s revenue chief says

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The head of Nigeria’s revenue agency, Zacch Adedeji, has reaffirmed that there is no plan for the introduction of new taxes in the country.

Adedeji, who is the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue, made the position known when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to the Revenue House in Abuja.

He was quoted as saying, “the President gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes,” in a statement signed by the Special Adviser on Media to the FIRS chairman, Dare Adekanmbi.

“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.

“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of tax. We are only determined to increase the pie. We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes. We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers.”

He stated that by restructuring “our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium, and small,” FIRS has enhanced its customer relations. He continued by saying that President Bola Tinubu wanted to increase Nigerians’ purchasing power in order to promote growth and increase businesses’ capacity for productivity through the recently implemented consumer credit scheme.

The Nigerian government has been working to overhaul the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies since the start of the Bola Tinubu administration. This has resulted in the central bank and the Oyedele-led tax advisory council implementing daring new policies.

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