NEW TELEGRAPH
Renowned news- paper outfit, Financial Times has pointed out that.Nigeria’s oil and gas industry is in bad shape. Noting that the sector was the source of much of Nigeria’s foreign receipts and more than half of government revenues, it said that the nation’s oil and gas industry had failed to cash in on global energy hunger.
It also said that poor security and infrastructural under-investment had blighted national prospects. It said: “Although figures released by Nigeria’s national statistics bureau show $45.6 billin in revenue last year, a 46 per cent rise on 2021 levels, those numbers hide an uncomfortable truth: oil production in Nigeria has been falling steadily over the past few years.
“In April, the country produced less than 1mn barrels of oil daily, far below its 1.8mn bpd Opec quota. So, even though oil prices spiked in 2022, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the longer-term story of Nigeria’s energy industry has been one of lost opportunity.”
FT stated that oil production in Nigeria had been blighted by large- scale theft and vandalism, as well as decades of under-investment in infrastructure. It also noted that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) could not meet the nation’s output targets.
It noted that the security situation in the sector had become so dire that the Federal Government have contracted Tantita Security Service Nigeria Limited (TSSNL) owned by Government Ekpemupolo better known as Tompolo, a former Niger Delta militant leader, to protect pipelines.
It stated that fuel subsidies, introduced in the 1970s to provide cheap petrol for Nigerians, had also robbed NNPCL of vital resources to invest, noting that last year, NNPCL paid out $10 billion worth of subsidies to distributors.
THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN NEW TELEGRAPH
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