The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) Wednesday revealed that the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) data put revenue losses from crude theft at $1.56 billion and refined product losses at $1.85 billion while companies operating in the sector puts the figure of crude losses at N38.54 billion.
This was just as the Management of NNPC had told the House Ad-hoc Committee on Crude Oil theft in Nigeria on Tuesday at a public hearing that they have no records of crude oil theft as against the data supplied to the Committee by CISLAC.
The Executive Director of the CISLAC Auwal Rafsanjani who led about 25 other civil society groups to the public hearing gave statistics of crude oil losses obtained from NNPC and some International Oil Companies.
Rafsanjani said there has been an upsurge in the activities of oil theft in Nigeria which became obvious in August 2019 when the National Economic Council (NEC) headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo alleged that 22.6 million barrels of oil estimated at $1.35 billion were stolen between January and July 2019.
According to him, the National Economic Council Committee on Pipeline Vandalism headed by Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, drew attention to Nigeria’s potential risk of losing $2.7 billion worth of oil in two years.
He said :”two profound studies by the Nigeria Natural Resource Charter (NNRC) and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) have also put the country’s loss to oil theft at N4.57 trillion between 2015 and 2018 and $41.9 billion between 2009 and 2018 respectively.
“While there is clarity on what is covered in the figures above, there are a whole lot of other dimensions and trends that were not taken into account when counting the loss to oil theft in Nigeria”.
He said the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative giving what it described as conservative estimates of oil looses from some IOCs (SHELL, Chevron & Agip) self-reporting indicates that Nigeria lost between 150,000b/day – 400,000b/day (7.5%-20% of total production of 2mbd) amounting to $10.9billion to oil theft from 2009-2011.
The CISLAC boss quoted the same NEITI 2019 report as saying that Nigeria lost $41.9billion between 2009–2018 averaging $11.47million/day, $349million/month and $4.19billion annually.
“While the above figures largely represent figures collected from official sources (presumable obliged by oil companies), they do not necessary capture other different sources of leakages already identified in this memorandum. Those sources include industrial scale over-lifting and other pilfering that happen through official channels”, he added.
James Kwen, Abuja
