As damning as a recent report that Nigeria may have lost about 200 million barrels to organised theft in the first 11 months of 2021 would seem, it came as no surprise. Going by figures from the Nigerian Upstream Regulatory Petroleum Commission (NURPC) obtained by THISDAY, while Nigeria was expected to pump approximately 635 million barrels of oil by last November, only 441 million barrels were produced within the period. This aligns with a report from the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) released earlier last year that Nigeria loses 138,400 barrels of crude per day (about 7% of its total production) to theft, oil-spills, or shortage-in production. The loss, according to the report, is “neither hypothetical nor episodic. It is real and endemic.” It is unfortunate that oil theft has for decades remained a huge drain on the economy of Nigeria without concerted efforts to deal with the […]