Group Managing Director, of Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, Mele Kyari, says the company recorded 9,000 infractions on oil pipelines in one year. He said it was obvious that crude oil theft was almost an end-to-end issue in Nigeria, adding that it was very clear that a lot of people were involved. Kyari made the revelation during the House of Representatives Special Committee on Oil Theft oversight function presence at the headquarters of NNPC Ltd yesterday, in Abuja. Kyari said “From 2022 to date we have deactivated 6,465 illegal refineries.
We have also removed 4,876 illegal connections to a pipeline out of 5,570 that we have discovered.” He added that the NNPC was not sure if that was the actual number, adding that it still has about a thousand that the corporation knew had not yet been removed. “Some of the scale of the infraction that we see is unbelievable; we are not able to deal with it. When you remove one connection, the next day in the same location, someone will replace it. In most of these locations, they are less than a hundred meters from the settlement; some are even less than a hundred meters from the local government headquarters,” he added. He said notwithstanding the distance, the evils “are being perpetrated unabated,” adding that this makes it impossible to guarantee the production that would happen the next day.
