The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has lamented about $48 million (or N17 billion) revenue loss to oil theft in the past five months flowing from the benchmark oil price exchange rate of N360/$1.

The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mallam Mele Kyari, said this during an interactive hearing on ‘Exiting Petroleum Subsidy: Ensuring Self-Sufficiency in Domestic Refining of Petroleum Products’ by the Senate Joint Committee on Petroleum Resources (Upstream and Downstream).

Kyari, who said the $48 million loss was lower than the $825 million and $725 million recorded in 2018 and 2019 respectively, attributed the reduction to  increased surveillance of oil pipelines by the security agencies.

Speaking on the volume of Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) being consumed daily in the Country, the GMD said the corporation had no knowledge of the daily consumption of petroleum products or volume being.

He said: “We don’t know how much petroleum we consume daily in this Country, but we know how much of product is taken out of depots.” According to him, this year about 54 million litres of petroleum product are being evacuated from the depots daily, but the consumption is somewhere below that.

He also stated that the state-owned oil Company did not also know the actual volume of products being transported across Nigeria’s borders to neighbouring Countries.

According to him, “it is impossible to know, nobody declares it, and therefore as it crosses, it goes.” On the state of the Country’s refineries, Kyari said NNPC “deliberately” shut down the Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt refineries for two reasons, due to the low value of extracted or refined products and inability of the corporation to guarantee crude oil supply to these lines.

The Managing Director of the Corporation, blamed the problem on the failure to carry out proper turn around maintenance, adding that “we have not done proper maintenance in the last 30 years, and the cumulative effect is that even when you start it today, it cannot be run optimally.

Speaking further on why the poor State of the refineries, Kyari said the Corporation spent N64 billion to resuscitate Kaduna refinery without achieving any meaningful result.

While assuring that the corporation was working with partners to fix the refineries, Kyari lamented that there had been several failed attempts to remove to remove fuel subsidy.

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