Senate has commended the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for responding to the motion moved during a plenary session by Kabiru Marafa, chairman, Committee on Petroleum Downstream, on the theft of petroleum products kept in the farm tanks of two oil companies.
The Senate urged the corporation to take more radical measures to avoid recurrence.
In a statement by its spokesman, Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, the apex legislative body advised that the Corporation should go beyond the sacking and redeployment of a few officials and initiate a comprehensive restructuring of its operations, which presently allowed officials and other firms to appropriate national resources for their personal use, thereby contributing to the suffering of the people.
The management of the NNPC had last week asked some of its top officials to leave, over missing petrol.
Those asked to step down are the managing director of the NNPC Retail, Esther Nnamdi-Ogbue; general manager (operations) of NNPC Retail, Mamza Gwadabe, as well as Ibrahim Bello, another official of NNPC retail.
The Corporation had lost 130 million litres through a breach in its throughput transactions with MRS and Capital Oil. However, MRS had returned the product it sold from the stock but Capital Oil is yet to refund the 82 million litres it sold. The missing fuel sold by Capital Oil is valued at N11 billion.
But in a statement sign by Abdullahi on Monday, he noted that: “The Senate is appalled that NNPC is not contemplating on doing something about the involvement of officials of the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC), which actually played key roles in the missing products case.
“It is instructive that NNPC did not do anything on the case until the matter was raised on the floor of the Senate and the press picked the matter up from the motion. The unauthorised sale of 132 million litres of fuel kept in the storage tanks of MRS and Capital Oil designated as strategic reserves is a grave occurrence.
“This probably is not the first time it is happening, and NNPC must review its operations. It should in fact carry out a shake up in the PPMC,” he said.
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