Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has appealed to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to help tackle the menace of crude oil theft in the country.

Gatekeepers News reports that the Group Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mele Kyari, appealed at an interactive session with the EFCC’s Executive Chairman, Ola Olukoyede, at the NNPC Towers in Abuja on Monday.

Kyari discussed measures taken to eliminate corruption and address crude oil theft and pipeline vandalism.

“As we continue to do our best to deepen transparency and stamp out corruption from the system, there is one big challenge that you will need to help us with, Mr. Chairman. That challenge is crude theft. It fits into everything you have said – the people, the asset, the opportunity, and the absence of deterrence.”

“We have deactivated 6,409 illegal refineries in the Niger Delta region. Today, we have disconnected up to 4,846 illegal pipes connected to our pipelines, that is out of 5,543 such illegal connection points. That means there are a vast number of such connections that we have not removed.

“These things don’t just happen from the blues. They happen in communities and locations we all know. As we remove one illegal connection, another one comes up. It is sad, Mr. Chairman.”

“This kind of thing does not happen anywhere else in the world. When we say illegal connections, they are not invisible things, they are big pipes that require some level of expertise to be installed. Some of them are of the same size as the trunk line itself. No one would produce crude oil knowing fully well that it is not going to get to the terminal. That is why nobody is putting money into the business. So, you can’t grow production.”

“I believe, personally, that the very purpose of your commission is to curtail economic crimes, and there is no bigger economic crime of this scale anywhere else than what is happening in this area,” the GCEO lamented.