THE Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited ( NNPCL) Mele Kyari, has claimed that over 5,000 kilometers of oil pipelines across Nigeria had been damaged by vandals.
He lamented that the activities of the vandals were adversely affecting the company’s operations.
Kyari said this during an interactive session with members of the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream), in Abuja, on Tuesday, November 22.
Despite the challenges, he assured Nigerians that the nation’s four oil refineries would be functional soon.
Kyari highlighted oil pipeline vandalism as a longstanding challenge for the sector, citing the inability to transport oil through pipelines from Warri to Benin for the past 22 years.
“Over 5,000 kilometres of oil pipelines in the country are not working. As a result of pipeline vandalism, 10 million litres of oil were lost from the volume pumped from Aba to Enugu at a time.
“The company has been unable to pump oil from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years and cannot connect to Ore,” he said.
He also stressed that despite the company adopting several measures to secure its pipelines from being vandalised, the oil theft and pipeline vandalisation had persisted.
“There is no amount of security measures that had not been taken to curb the crime without success, which to us in NNPCL, is substantially a national calamity.”
The NNPCL boss further explained that the company was embarking on massive replacements of the pipelines.
Kyari added that the oil sector’s deregulation, particularly the removal of subsidies in May 2023, transformed NNPCL into a profitable entity.
He emphasized that prior to the 2018 deregulation, the company incurred a loss of N802 billion, which was remedied by the 2021 deregulation, resulting in a surplus profit of N687 billion.
Meanwhile, on his part the Chairman of the Senate committee, Ifeanyi Ubah, urged the NNPC Ltd to find a lasting solution to the issues of pipeline vandalism and oil thefts.
Ubah also advised the NNPC Ltd to increase the security surveillance of its pipelines.
Similarly, a member of the committee, Seriake Dickson, representing Bayelsa West, called on the NNPC Ltd to engage with locals on how best to secure the oil pipelines, adding that the company should award contract to the locals especially in oil producing areas as a way of negotiating the security of pipelines.
Usman Mustapha is a solution journalist with International Centre for Investigative Reporting. You can easily reach him via: [email protected]. He tweets @UsmanMustapha_M