RETHINKING THE LEGAL PARADIGM OF ENERGY RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The study implicates the lack of centrality of law and the rentier structure of the Nigerian Petro-State in the colossal market (economic) and State failures characterizing the Nigerian body Politik. The convoluted evolution of the Nigerian legal order disparages the creation of an environment of formal rational law which would have diffused and induced a highly predictable and calculable economic environment in which expectations of all economic actors are not wilfully disparaged by arbitrary rule. The macroeconomic model which derives from the study’s multidimensional analysis is subsequently invoked in the legal prototype which will drive and catalyze the far-reaching changes which are necessary to diversify the Nigerian economy away from the dominance of the extractive sector to the non-extractive tradable real sector. The legal paradigm constitutes a charter for the efficient husbandry of Nigeria’s petroleum resources such that at full depletion, Nigeria would have accumulated sufficient stock of non-oil capital and assets in the post-oil epoch from which it will earn a continuous stream of external receipt from strategic perspective investment of oil revenue.