Corporate social responsibility practices in the Nigerian oil industry: New legal direction and the implications for reporting

Despite several voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in the Nigerian oil industry, the existential conflicts in the corporate-community relations in the Niger Delta have remained unobliterated, which a responsive regulatory framework could fix. This chapter evaluated the voluntary CSR practices and the new law-mandated CSR model vis-à-vis the host communities and reflected on how much they addressed positive affirmative duties and negative injunction duties. We argued that both duties are reciprocal and mutually constitutive such that fulfilling the duty of care to not damage the environment creates value, while executing positive affirmative duties further enhances the value created. All past CSR models, including the more recent Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMOU) seemingly underpinned by transparency and accountability, lacked the moral expectation of negative injunction duties. However, the CSR model established by the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021 does not significantly differ from prior voluntary initiatives as it lacks the mechanism for communities to hold the corporations accountable for corporate environmental impacts. The legally institutionalised CSR model seems to be the corporations’ brainchild being identical to the GMOU model except with the legal add-on, thus resonating with “the hand of Esau, but the voice of Jacob”. Ironically, the legal add-on stands to benefit the corporations more as it now made explicit the hitherto implicit freedom-to-operate under the GMOU. Given the foregoing, CSR disclosures would not go beyond rhetoric if the underlying CSR model failed to embed both the positive affirmative duties and negative injunction duties. Therefore, it is categorically imperative for the PIA institutionalised CSR model to be re-evaluated so that it can mandate corporate compliance with negative injunction duties in promoting sustainable communities. It is when this is achieved that the benefits of corporate reporting anchored on legal regulation will be realised.