Mele Kyari. Group managing director/ chief executive of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company says it will be difficult to combat crude oil theft in the country so long security agencies are collaborating with oil thieves.
The nation’s crude is being stolen “by people supposed to provide security for these assets,” Kyari said.
The NNPC chief executive disclosed this during a Channels Television programme on Sunday.
Security forces which include the Navy, Army, Airforce, Police and others have been accused of aiding crude oil theft in Nigeria’s oil-bearing region in the Niger Delta, a situation that has been going on for years.
At least 700,000 barrels of crude are siphoned through various oil pipelines in the region, leading to a huge loss of revenue to the federal government.
At $90 per barrel, the country is losing a lot of dollar revenue that would have been channeled to areas that will benefit Nigerians, analysts said.
As a response to the threat, the federal government had recently contracted a company owned by repentant militant Government Ekpemupolo aka Tompolo to assist in combating oil theft, and the firm seems to have made some progress within the period to rid the region of oil thieves.
Last month, Tompolo’s men uncovered an illegal 4-kilometre pipeline connected from Forcados Terminal and operated for 9 years with about 600,000 barrels per day of oil lost in the same period. The company later disclosed that it has discovered close to 60 illegal oil points in the region where crude is being stolen.
In spite of the startling discoveries Kyari said security forces are frustrating efforts to further reduce oil theft.
He said those siphoning the country’s crude oil have employed modern technology in their quest to steal more, adding that some of the methods being used by the criminals are sophisticated and unknown to the company.
According to him, “When you introduce technology into stealing, and this is precisely what they did, and when there is a collaboration of people who should not be part of those activities, you can lay pipelines and no one will see it.
“You can do it at night if you have the ability, and ultimately this is what we think happened. You can lay pipelines for the wrong reasons to assets that may have been abandoned or even active, assets which are not meant for such purposes. That means you will see end-to-end collaboration either by people who are around those assets, people operating the assets, people supposed to provide security for these assets, and so on.
“And you can eliminate anything. When you find collaborators in the system, then you can get anything done. We didn’t know because the extent of collaboration is unknown to us, and essentially what this intervention process brought to the table is that knowledge that we didn’t know before.”
Recall that the hasty burning of an oil bunkering tanker arrested by Tompolo’s men had recently put the military on the spot.
Not a few said some powerful Nigerians with the connivance of the military are trying to conceal something from the public in the manner the vessel was hastily destroyed.
