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Our dear President,

My main purpose in writing you at this time is to seek your intervention on the menace of oil theft in Nigeria.

It is a well known
fact that hundreds of thousands of barrels of our crude oil leave our
shores illegally for the international market, daily.

The clandestine nature of the trade has made reliable statistics impossible.

However, estimates
leave the number of stolen barrels to an alarming 400,000 daily. At the
current crude rate of 82USD per barrel, this would amount to a whooping
32.8 million USD (N4.920 billion) daily worth of revenue lost to
criminals. It is believed that Nigeria has lost close to 25 billion USD
in the last ten years (an assertion by one of the major players in the
oil industry in Nigeria).

Indeed the extent of the loss in simply unquantifiable. This national hemorrhage is not only embarrassing but also unacceptable.

As an indigene of
Otueke community from Ogbia extraction, same as Oloibiri where oil was
first discovered in commercial quantities, this sad reality must be
twice worrisome to you, your Excellency.

A few years ago, an
audit conducted by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative (NEITI) revealed that the number of barrels of oil produced
in Nigeria is yet unknown because of the absence of precision meters at
flow stations. Currently what is known is the amount of oil exported as
metering is done only at various export terminals. The report further
reveals that all the losses of crude oil happen between the various
flow stations and these export terminals. This also affects the current
calculations of royalty and Petroleum Profit Tax (PPT) as defined in
our laws. These revelations have been in the public domain since 2006.

A peep into global
best practice reveals that precision meeting can happen at various flow
stations to get accurate hydrocarbon mass balance (actual number of
barrels of oil produced) and that it is both technically and
financially feasible to do same in Nigeria.

All concerned
regulatory agencies are aware but for some reasons no one has dared to
break the status quo and that is why I seek your kind intervention. The
Norwegian government had once offered technical assistance in this
regard to deploy a technology in monitoring oil production in the Niger
Delta. The institutional reforms proposed in the Petroleum Industry
Bill (PIB) (currently awaiting passage) have done nothing to improve
the metering regime. This is an opportunity to make history by stopping
these predatory activities, privileged criminality and economic
sabotage.

It may also please
Mr. President to note that it is widely believed by the public that the
same route through which our barrels of oil leave, serves as the route
of entry for all forms of arms and ammunition that are currently used
to perpetrate mayhem in many parts of our country today. From Jos to
Maidugiri, from Aba to Bauchi the new wave of crime that we are
witnessing today is a direct reflection of reckless inflow and stock
piling of small arms and light weapons mostly received from external
sources.

I respectfully ask
you to take advantage of the goodwill that your government is enjoying
internationally especially among energy partners in the Gulf of Guinea
to ensure that this wicked economic crime is put to a stop. Late
President Umaru Yar’ Adua at the G8 summit in 2008 called on the world
to, “treat stolen crude oil as it treats stolen diamonds as both
generate blood money”

Citizens deserve
the maximum benefits that are possible from our natural resource
endowment. Our oil will not last forever and so we must hurry to ensure
that we use the revenue to diversify our economy. This will require
rapid infrastructural development, industrialisation and job creation.
The beginning of this will be to plug any form of leakage in revenue,
improve our national earnings to be able to finance these capital
intensive long term projects.

There will also be no need for a nation like ours to borrow at this time.

Generations yet
unborn will not forgive us if we fail. No other Nigerian leader is
better positioned than you, your Excellency, to match rhetoric with
action in this regard.

I respectfully
await your usual swift action, which has endeared you to many, as a
listening and responsive leader. May wisdom be stirred up in you to
lead our country especially through free, fair and transparent
elections in 2011?

Yours Sincerely

Uche Igwe

Africa Policy Scholar Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington DC USA