Govt must review oil, gas policies - lawyers.

Tumaini University Dar es Salaam (TUDARCo)

Legal experts have called on the government to revisit its gas and oil policies, accusing it of downplaying the role of other specialists but engineers in preparations for running the relatively new industry.

 

At issues are concerns over whether Tanzania is prepared enough to run the sector amid severe shortage of experts in the industry at its infancy calling for legal specialists, economists, tax collectors, managers and administrators as opposed to engineers whose role would be notably visible only at the extraction stage.  

 

 Speaking at a conference on exploring the legal and regulatory framework of oil and gas industry in Tanzania, its financing transactions, bilateral agreements, nature of contracts and tax regime at  Tumaini University Dar es Salaam (TUDARCo),  the Programme Coordinator from the Faculty of Law Theresia Numbi noted on Monday that  the industry lacked all the experts but engineers. 

 

She also accused the government of being secretive in its industrial dealings, barring people from participating in making decisions about the use of their natural resources.  

 

“Our programme will give open ground to all people to participate and understand how they can participate in the sector,” she explained.    

 

An official from the Prime Minister’s Office Sofia Kijangwa concurred with the lawyers saying though the government has put more emphasis in training engineers and neglected other specialists in oil and gas, the former are not direly needed for the time being since oil and gas extraction process is yet to start. 

 

“The government is supposed to prepare experts who will be able to understand and interpret oil and gas contracts and negotiations to avoid agreements with wrong clauses that might in the long run dearly cost the country,” she insisted. 

 

She said just like in mining, contracts for oil and gas required professionals in international laws of contracts since it is the industry that is more aligned to international market than the internal. 

 

She said the current petroleum contracts need experts capable of making proper interpretation of clauses in the Petroleum Sharing Agreement (PSA), an international pact to which Tanzania is a signatory.  

 

Citing the importance of tax experts, Ms Kijangwa said they are direly needed for tax transactions during three stages, namely the mainstream, mid-stream and downstream involved in extraction process in the absence of a specific law governing taxation in petroleum industry. 

 

Rungwe District Commissioner Amoni Nyingi who is also a lawyer played a patriotic card in oil and gas industry suggesting that the government should invest in local specialists and refrain from outsourcing or importing foreigners to train the local experts. 

 

“The money spent for training our people abroad or taking experts from oversees should be used to train our local engineers at home to reduce the costs,” he said.