Nigeria’s raging oil theft has sparked trade accusations between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), the government and the Nigerian military.
The group managing director and chief executive officer of the NNPCL Mele Kyari, on Sunday, accused the government and security officials of conniving with oil thieves to steal Nigeria’s crude oil.
Kyari, who has been at the center of the crisis, said both government and security officials are deeply involved in the sophisticated oil theft. He said they use technology to lay invisible pipelines that they use to lift stolen oil.
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
Kyari, who was speaking at Channels Television Newsnight programme, said the connivance, which has aided massive stealing of Nigeria’s crude oil, was unknown to the NNPCL.
“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,” Kyari said.
Nigeria was losing about half of its daily oil production to the oil thieves before some of the pipelines they used were discovered. Last month, Kyari lamented the discovery of a 4-kilometer pipeline from the Forcados export terminal, being used to steal oil for nine years, resulting in the theft of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day.
More pipelines have been discovered since then, underlining the depth of the oil theft that has significantly reduced Nigeria’s oil output and revenue. Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, is the only oil-producing country that did not benefit from the oil windfall orchestrated by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
With the resulting revenue drop, the Nigerian government has taken to borrowing to fund its budgets, pushing its public debt profile to more than N42 trillion as of August.
The complicity of the government is noted in its unwillingness to expose the officials named in the oil theft crisis. In June, the Nigeria Security and Civil Service Defense Corps (NSCDC) Delta state command revealed that high profile individuals are behind the oil theft crisis. The Corps public relation officer Emeka Peters said that heads will roll, if the corps decides to publish the names of those behind crude oil theft, pipeline vandalism, illegally dealing in petroleum products and economic Sabotage.
While Kyari’s statement beams of honesty and boldness, it only lends credence to what many have been saying. It is also a sort of self-indictment since the NNPCL is a government corporation, which means that its officers could also be involved in illegal oil activities.