Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, has said the country lost about $46 billion (N16.25 trillion) to crude oil theft between 2009 and 2020.
This is even as a committee of the House summoned the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited, Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, and Ministry of Petroleum Resources, among others, for failing to honour its invitation.
The speaker, who spoke yesterday in Abuja while inaugurating the ad hoc committee to investigate crude oil theft and loss of revenue, said the menace of crude oil theft has drastically hampered the growth of the country’s oil production, with Nigeria losing between five and 30 per cent of daily crude oil production.
He, however, expressed shock that critical agencies in the oil and gas sector had refused to honour the committees’ invite, adding that the agencies were not doing the nation any good by refusing to appear before the parliament to answer questions on the critical aspect of the economy.
Represented by chairman of the House Committee on Petroleum Upstream, Al Hassan Ado Doguwa, the speaker said if decisive action was not taken to address the issue, the country might be thrown into a deeper fiscal crisis due to dwindling revenue from the oil and gas sector.
Quoting data from the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, the speaker said Nigeria’s oil production declined from 2.51 million barrels per day in 2005 to 1.77 million barrels per day in 2020.
He said: “NEITI reports also show that 619 million barrels of crude valued at $46 billion were stolen in the period 2009-2020”, adding that “Nigeria has continually failed to meet its daily production quota as set by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.”
Abbas explained further that “recently, Nigeria’s OPEC quota was reduced from 1.742 million barrels per day to 1.38 million barrels per day.
Yet, the country is still struggling to meet this quota as daily production output was 1.184 million barrels per day and 1.249 million barrels per day in May and June 2023 respectively.
“On average, current daily production output is a far cry from the budget assumption of 1.69 million per day. The implication is clearly manifest in the economic crisis that the country is facing.”