By Leonard Okachie
Persons with Disabilities (PWDs) have called on the Federal Government to develop a supplementary Petroleum Industry Act(PIA) that ensured their inclusion in the PIA benefit structures.
This appeal was made during a three-day workshop on the PIA and Disability Laws, organised by the Centre for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD) in Umuahia.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was with the theme: “Ending Barriers Against Niger-Deltans with Disabilities (EBAND)”, and funded by the Ford Foundation.
The PWDs, who belong to different disability clusters in Abia, channelled their demands to the government through the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC).
The appeal was part of the demand charter for their inclusion in the PIA benefit structures in Abia.
They urged NUPRC to mandate the Host Community Development Trusts (HCDTs) to integrate their needs and voices into the PIA benefit structures.
They noted that the current Act recognised women, youths, and traditional rulers, but was quiet on issues concerning them.
The PWDs also urged NUPRC to ensure the employment of at least five per cent allocation for the disability community as stipulated in the National Disability Law.
NAN further reports that one of the key provisions of the Act is that oil companies must provide three per cent of their annual operating expenditure to fund the HCDTs.
Mr Wisdom Okechukwu, Chairman, Joint National Association of Persons With Disabilities(JONAPWD), Abia, said that the cluster heads of PWDs were unanimous in their demands.
He said that JONAPWD, as the umbrella body of all the PWDs organisations in the state, was simply making a general demand of inclusion in all the structures of benefits in the PIA implementation.
Okechukwu said that other stakeholders like the oil companies operating in the host communities, the traditional institutions, civil society organisations, business community and others were included in the charter.
He commended CCD for the three-day programme, saying that it had sensitised the disability community and the relevant stakeholders on the need for PWDs’ inclusion in all the PIA activities.
In a remark, Mr David Anyaele, Chairman, Abia State Commission for the Welfare of Disabled Persons, pledged the commission’s commitment to ensuring that the PWDs were not shortchanged in the state.
He said that the commission would engage stakeholders to ensure that PWDs played leadership roles in the host community board of trustees and host community advisory committee.
According to him, this is in line with the policy of Gov. Alex Otti on PWDs, which is that this category of citizens is represented at all levels of leadership in the state government.
“The commission will work to engage PIA stakeholders to ensure that the host community needs assessment and host community development plans are inclusive of the concerns of PWDs,” he said.
The Acting Director of CCD, Mr Godwin Unumeri, said the programme, across nine Niger Delta states targeted PWDs’ inclusion in PIA benefits.
He insisted that the ultimate goal of the workshop was to ensure that PWDs were factored into the activities of HCDTs and all the other benefit structures in the PIA.
Unumeri said that CCD decided to build the capacity of the PWDs for them to understand the general purpose of demand charter.
“We are going to harmonise all their demands into a single document.
“We will use the charter to develop advocacy documents that we will present to various stakeholders as we move along,” he said.(NAN)
