Mele Kyari, the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, has stated that government officials in the country are collaborating with oil thieves.
Speaking on Channels TV, where he made this known, Kyari said aside from government officials, security operatives in the country are also working with thieves to steal Nigeria’s crude oil.
While noting that oil theft is affecting the country’s revenue, the NNPC chief also revealed that those involved in crude oil theft now use technology to lay pipelines that no one can see.
His words: “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.”
Why NNPC is concerned about oil theft
In 2022 Q1, NNPC released data that showed that Nigeria was losing about 250, 000 barrels per day of crude oil to theft. This did not only bring the total loss to about $1.5 billion daily but has consequently become the possible biggest threat to national development and the environment.
Just as economic woes are exacerbating Nigeria, oil theft by criminal networks and corrupt public officeholders in the country is ravaging the economy.
