By Kingsley Omose
Appearing before the Senate Ad-Hoc Committee Investigating Economic Sabotage chaired by Senator Opeyemi Bamidele on August 7, 2024, Mele Kyari made the following statements as part of his opening remarks:
“And I can share with you Mr Chairman, just a month and a half ago, we were actually down to almost 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.
It’s simply an infrastructure unavailability issue associated with acts of vandals and oil thieves. Mr. Chairman you will agree that NNPCL is not a security organization but yet we got the support of Mr President to set up an accelerated process of intervention and it is paying off.
You have to restore that confidence before you can talk about growth. Let me share something with you Mr Chairman, in year 2020 during the Covid, in one day our production without doing anything, we hit 2.47 million barrels per day.
17th of April to be very specific Mr Chairman, and what happened? The thieves and the vandals went to sleep because there’s nowhere to take it to, the market went to sleep, and we now know that without doing anything we have such capacity, but we can’t achieve this until you are able to arrest the situation that is on ground.”
There is a whole lot of insights to unpack in these statements made by Mele Kyari but let us focus on just three. The first was the crude oil production figures in Nigeria on April 17, 2020, which was 2.47 million barrels of crude oil per day, which represents a high of sorts. The second is the daily crude oil production figures as of June 2024, 1.4 million barrels per day, a low of sorts, leaving a shortfall of at least 1.07 million barrels per day.
The third is that Mele Kyari puts the blame for these over 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil loss in production between April 2020, and June 2024 (over 1,500 days at an average loss of 1,000,000 barrels of crude oil daily), at the feet of thieves and vandals who repeatedly vandalize the infrastructure used for evacuating crude oil from production facilities scattered all over the Niger Delta so as to steal crude oil.
But the simple question for Mele Kyari is that even those responsible for Oil Bunkering and causing Nigeria daily crude oil losses of at least 1,000,000 barrels of crude oil daily that he classifies as thieves and vandals, how did they manage to evacuate over 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil stolen between 2020 and 2024 after vandalising the relevant infrastructure?
To classify those engaged in Oil Bunkering as mere thieves and vandals as Mele Kyari has done, implies that there are refineries existing illegally in the Niger Delta serving as off takers and that have the capacities to refine at least 1,000,000 barrels of crude oil per day being stolen by these thieves and vandals.
Omose, a Public Policy analyst contributed this article from Lagos
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