The Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Nigeria has agreed that increasing oil thefts on the economy is affecting the accretion of the country’s foreign reserves.
Godwin Emefiele, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, stated this while reading the communiqué after the inaugural Monetary Policy Committee meeting in Abuja yesterday.
The Federal Government has disclosed it is finalizing plans to deal with the issue of oil theft, which forces Nigeria to lose $4 billion annually or 150,000 as reported by Bloomberg.
What the CBN said
Reading his speech, the Governor said, “The committee noted, with grave concern, the unprecedented rate of oil theft recorded in recent time and its debilitating impact on government revenue and accretion to reserves.”
In the medium term, he said, the MPC was hopeful that the Dangote Refinery’s planned start-up later this year would assist in boosting Nigeria’s petroleum product supply.
He said the MPC also noticed that the rising price of fuel was exacerbated by a lack of energy supplies, which had a negative impact on domestic prices.
“MPC advises the CBN management and the fiscal authorities to take specific and urgent actions to avoid many power generating stations shutdown for turn-around maintenance, resulting in the current unwarranted shutdown of generating assets,” he said.
- The committee also evaluated the bank’s multiple interventions to boost productivity in manufacturing, industry, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, healthcare, and micro, small, and medium firms, according to Emefiele.
- He said the bank disbursed N29.67 billion under the Anchor Borrowers’ Program between January and February 2022 for the procurement of inputs and the planting of maize, rice, and wheat, the three crops that had previously been major sources of FX demand.
- “These disbursements bring the total under the programme to over 4.52 million smallholder farmers, cultivating 21 commodities across the country, comes to a total of N975.61bn,” he said.
In case you missed it
- Austin Avuru, founding MD/CEO of Seplat Energy, last week, stated that some oil production wells don’t get to see 80% of production making it to the terminals due to oil theft, as he calls for a national emergency in the oil sector.
- Tony Elumelu, Chairman of UBA Banking Group and Heirs Holdings has stated that the reason Nigeria cannot meet its crude oil production quota and benefit from high oil prices is due to theft.
- He stated that Nigeria is losing 95% of oil production to oil thieves, citing the Bonny terminal oil theft that should be receiving over 200k barrels of crude oil daily, instead it receives less than 3,000 barrels.
