The Nigerian oil
sector must be one of the sectors that tolerates blatant disregard for
transparency in the land. Being a mono-product economy and depending so
much on foreign expertise, technology and dictates opens the sector to
peculiar challenges than should be the case.
A reading of the
2005 Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s (NEITI)
audit report reveals three interesting things. One of them is that the
Niger Delta Development Commission (NNDC) claimed to have received more
money than it was given. There must be more miracles lurking in the
accounting books of the NNDC. Remember that in their 2010 budget, they
had a chicken-change sum of N90m for staff marriages and bereavements!
The commission defended the outrageous budgetary allocation on the
grounds that it was dictated by emotional intelligence. Peculiar
intelligence, one would say.
The second
interesting matter that emerged from the NEITI audit was that the
Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation still relies largely on
paper-based accounting systems. This could be a possible reason why we
keep receiving conflicting signals as to whether the corporation is
solvent or insolvent. Besides cracking our brains over the incoherence
that reigns in the chambers of the executive council, we should perhaps
pardon ministers and big shots that have been shooting out those
divergent messages. If you have to drill through all those piles of
paper, with figures backed with endless zeroes, at the end of the day,
you could end up at any end of the pipe. And, who knows, some rats may
help themselves to some of those delicious crude covered accounting
sheets. Some calculators were said to have become overheated during
election figures collation simply because they were not given enough
time to cool down before new figures were hammered in.
The third thing we
will consider should receive the gold medal for crass impunity. The
NEITI auditors reveal that Nigeria does not know exactly how much crude
oil is being drilled from the many wells of the Niger Delta on a daily
basis. The operators, the oil companies who often claim to be baking
the national pie, would simply not provide such data to the auditors.
But they do provide some sort of figures, don’t they? Of course, they
give figures of how much crude reaches the export terminals and other
distribution points.
The question is:
what happens between the pump heads and the terminal points? The
massive leakage that occurs between those points is what the oil
companies do not want us to know. That gaping hole is what the Nigerian
government must plug. That sore gash is what the Nigerian people must
demand an account of.
Reports are replete
in the news media of petty oil thieves in the creeks of the Niger Delta
who break pipes, siphon crude oil into drums and tanks and then refine
them in rickety contraptions often referred to as illegal or bush
refineries. While no one can deny the existence of these pilferers, the
truth must be told about where the bulk of Nigerian crude goes and into
whose throats and pockets.
Why would the oil
companies refuse to give figures of extracted oil measured at the well
heads? Why is the Directorate of Petroleum Resources (DPR) unable to
independently measure and provide such figures? Who are those raising
brick walls against transparency? Why are we prostrate before the
altars of these oil moguls? We have heard of offers being made to the
DPR to acquire equipment as well as training for independent metering
of production in the oil fields. What or who stopped the acceptance of
that much-needed capacity boost?
The clear suspicion
in all these is that the oil companies are complicit. There must be
something to gain by hiding the figures. Pronouncements from public
figures such as the outgoing Speaker of the House of Representatives
and the governor of Delta State, among others, add up to mean that
probably as much oil as is being officially exported daily is also
being stolen.
Remember that a
ship caught with stolen crude sprinted out of naval detention a couple
of years ago. We perceive a matrix of high-powered players in the oil
theft industry. This is far beyond pointing fingers at petty thieves
who steal crude oil in buckets only to ferry them in crude barges to
ships lurking off the coast. An international syndicate must be at
play, with local fat cats keeping the machines well oiled, literally.
The NEITI Act
empowers the body to prosecute any company or government official who
refuses to give needed information, or who falsifies the information
that may be needed in the furtherance of the pursuit of transparency in
the sector. Not knowing exactly how much oil is being extracted daily
raises a number of concerns. For one, we cannot reasonably be sure of
how much Nigeria’s oil reserves are if the amount being extracted is
not known. Secondly, we cannot reasonably estimate how much crude oil
is being stolen or lost into the environment.
Why no oil company or government official has been prosecuted for
refusing to tell Nigeria how much crude oil is being drilled on a daily
basis, is a question that needs an answer. We simply cannot keep on
drilling in the dark.
