Claims by the Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited of widespread haemorrhage in its supply chain have come under fresh scrutiny. And those claims just do not seem to be holding up to the integrity test. Consequently, they do not relieve the oil giant of its governance responsibility, and the earlier it faces up to the task the better.
NNPC Group Chief Executive Officer Mele Kyari, last week, relayed the narrative of the bleeding supply system. He said crude oil theft had become such pervasive phenomenon that it involves religious clergy, community leaders and government officials among others. Efforts to prevent the theft, according to him, has resulted in more than 700,000 barrels of crude oil being locked in daily. Speaking at the weekly State House Briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team, he said no fewer than 295 illegal connections were detected on a 200km stretch of pipeline in one instance. “Because of the very unfortunate acts of vandals along our major pipelines from Atlas Cove all the way to Ibadan, and all others connecting all the 37 depots that we have across the country, none of them can take delivery of products today. The reason is very simple. For some of the lines, for instance, from Warri to Benin, we haven’t operated for 15 years. Every molecule of product that we put gets lost,” he stated inter alia, adding: “We discovered that some of the pipelines were actually connected to individuals’ homes. And not only that, with all sensitivity to our religious beliefs, some of the pipelines and some of the products that we found are in churches and mosques…”
At least two issues arose concerning Kyari’s media briefing. One is that, with the NNPC boss code-switching between crude oil theft and refined products supply chain, it wasn’t clear which exactly he was referring to. Then, he said nothing about measures taken against identified suspects of oil theft beyond the supply network being shut down, which isn’t governance but abdication.
A more damning blow to NNPC’s narrative was the query raised by Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs, Hameed Ali, over estimated daily consumption of refined product. Speaking at a hearing by House of Representatives Committee on the Medium Term Expenditure Framework for 2023-2025, Ali punctured the claim that NNPC supplies about 98million litres of petrol daily when actual consumption is estimated at 60million litres, saying: “If we are consuming 60million litres of petrol per day by their own computation, why in the world do you allow the lifting of 98million litres per day?” He indeed questioned how 60million litres could be said to be consumed daily when consumption pattern can’t be same every single day.
NNPC needs to do a lot more that complain about the bleeding supply network. It is its responsibility to stop the bleeding.