The Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), Mele Kyari, has lamented that vandalism carried out on over 5,000 kilometres of oil pipelines by vandals across the country has become a national calamity.
Kyari on Tuesday made the lamentation during an interactive session with the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream). However, assured Nigerians that the Nation’s four oil refineries would be made functional very soon.
The problem of oil pipeline vandalism according to him, has been bedeviling the sector over the decades as the company had not been able to pump oil through pipeline from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years.
Kyari said, “Over 5,000 kilometres of oil pipelines in the country are not working. As a result of pipeline vandalism, 10 million litres of oil were lost from the volume pumped from Aba to Enugu at a time.
“The company has been unable to pump oil from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years and cannot connect to Ore (a town in Ondo State).”
“There is no amount of security measures that had not been taken to curb the crime without success, which to us in NNPCL, is substantially a national calamity,” he added.
