The National Production Monitoring System recently deployed by the Department of Petroleum Resources as an accounting solution for crude oil and gas is expected to engender transparency, curb crude oil theft and also help the country ascertain its daily production, Ejiofor Alike reports
A major challenge facing Nigeria’s oil and gas industry is crude theft, which has led to loss of billions of dollars annually by both the producing companies and the federal government.
In 2013, the then Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, had told journalists at the Spring Meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC, United States, that the federal government was losing $1 billion monthly to crude oil theft, translating to a loss of $12 billion yearly.
The Nigeria Natural Resource Charter (NNRC) had also estimated that the country lost N1.6 trillion in 2016 and N995 billion…
