In an interview published by the Financial Times on Friday, the Nigerian business mogul, Tony Elumelu insisted that the government reveal those stealing the country’s oil, especially considering that these criminals do so using large vessels.
According to him, around 18% of production is still lost due to theft.
“This is oil theft, we’re not talking about stealing a bottle of Coke you can put in your pocket. The government should know; they should tell us. Look at America, Donald Trump was shot at and quickly they knew the background of who shot him,” he said.
Our security agencies should tell us who is stealing our oil. You bring vessels to our territorial waters and we don’t know?”
He noted that he is a first hand witness to the theft problem and has fully apprehended why multinational oil firms are selling off some of their onshore holdings, as seen in the Punch.
When Elumelu’s firm was forced to halt production in 2022, he resorted to social media and tweeted: “How can we be losing over 95 percent of oil production to thieves? Look at the Bonny Terminal which should be receiving over 200,000 barrels of crude oil daily, instead, it receives less than 3,000 barrels, leading the operator Shell to declare force majeure.
The reason Nigeria is unable to meet its OPEC production quota is not because of low investment but because of theft, pure and simple! “Meanwhile, oil-producing countries are smiling as their foreign reserves are rising. What is Nigeria’s problem? We need to hold our leaders more accountable!”
He also revealed that his first attempt to purchase an oil field was thwarted in 2017 by the late Abba Kyari, the chief of staff of former President Muhammadu Buhari.
During the interview, he claimed to have been told that Nigeria could not permit a private operator to have anything with such strategic value. Elumelu claimed that this was illogical because he would have been buying it from a foreign corporation.
