The Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) has asked President Bola Tinubu to deploy more troops to the Niger Delta in a bid to combat the menace of crude oil theft and boost the country’s foreign reserve.
Crude oil theft in the past few years have been at a massive scale leading to shortage in government’s revenues and divestments from oil majors in shallow water fields.
The President of the association, Festus Osifo stated that increase in oil production is the only solution to address problems in the foreign exchange.
- He stated, “The easiest and earliest way to get out of this foreign exchange problem is to increase oil production,”
- “We appeal to government of President Tinubu to relocate the military commanders to the Niger delta region (where Nigeria’s oil is produced) to ensure that this menace of oil theft is put to a halt, and we will be able to generate more revenues at the end of the day.”
Backstory
Nigeria relies on crude oil sales to meet about 60% of its projected revenues and around 90% of its foreign exchange leading to reduced government’s income and the weakening of the naira.
- Although there has been significant increase in oil output in the past few months owing to the efforts of security, However, the country’s crude oil production in the first quarter of the year still falls below the budget benchmark of 1.78 million barrels per day.
- In January, Nigeria’s daily crude oil production averaged 42 million barrels per day while that of February stood at 1.32 million bpd. The National Security Adviser (NSA) to President Tinubu had earlier stated that the country loses around 400,000 barrels of crude oil daily.
- Insecurity across the Niger Delta have prompted the federal government to deploy local security contractors to protect oil facilities and combat oil theft in collaboration with state security apparatus. In March, around 17 soldiers of the Nigerian military were killed in Delta in relation to oil theft.