August 11:
The recent claim by the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, that crude oil theft through illegal bunkering and vandalisation of oil pipelines, was the major factor reducing the oil output of Africa’s largest producer, Nigeria, has been faulted.
Diezani’s position was made during this year’s International Conference and Exhibition of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in Lagos last week.
Reacting to the statement, Dr. Isaac Osuoke, of the Social Development Integrated Centre, said the country was losing more on deliberate oil theft than pipeline vandalism.
Represented by Mr. Emmanuel Bekee of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Osuoke said crude oil theft from pipeline vandalism was the most prominent challenge negatively impacting Nigeria’s oil Industry.
“Theft-related vandalism has metamorphosed to the current trend and scale, from community agitation for resource control, pipeline sabotage to attract contracts for remediation, to militant activism and theft of condensate and refined products,” Bekee said.
But Osuoke maintained that “although the ugly syndrome of oil bunkering through illegal pipeline vandalism poses a daunting challenge to the Nigerian economy, it constitutes a small proportion of the problem, when compared with the colossal level of crude oil theft and the theft of crude oil revenue perpetrated by some key players in the petroleum industry.
“On very many occasions, the Federal Government of Nigeria has recurrently attributed the shortage in oil production to illegal oil bunkering through pipeline hacking.
“But no emphasis is placed on the barrels of crude oil fraudulently converted by some stakeholders in the sector, as well as the huge sums of oil revenue stolen and unaccounted for,” he alleged.
He said in a statement issued in Port Harcourt, Rivers State on Monday that available reports have shown that the massive looting of crude oil revenue through fraudulent subsidy payments and the conversion of the public-owned oil into the private hands of some influential operators in the oil sector, far outweigh the oil revenue lost to pipeline vandalism.
Osuoke stated other forms of crude oil theft allegedly perpetrated by the key stakeholders in the Industry to include the illegal oil theft at export terminals under the guise of topping, the siphoning of oil from the wellhead and trade mispricing.
“Statistics indicates that the failure of the federal, state and local governments to ensure transparency and accountability in the equitable utilisation of the substantial revenue from crude oil resources, has led to years of acute wastage in the Petroleum Sector.
“The recommendations made in these reports to combat the corruption in the sector, have not been fully implemented, but the Nigerian government would rather focus on pipeline vandalism, as though it were the most prominent form of oil theft, which is not true,” he said.
The activist said “as a result of the weak and inadequate democratic institutions in Nigeria, there has been poor accountability in the management of revenues accruing from the exploitation of natural resources in the country.
“The oil corporations and the government have jointly engaged in opaque transactions, devoid of transparency, and the bulk of the oil revenue has been stolen, while the poorly enforced regulations on crude oil exploitation have exposed host communities to very significant violations to their livelihoods and their environment, without access to ready remedies or redress”.
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