Chief Edwin Clark, an elder statesman and Ijaw leader, has urged the federal government to launch a judicial investigation into oil theft in the nation.
At a news conference on Monday in Abuja, Clark, who made the announcement, called oil theft a criminal crime.
If there was a sincere desire to figure out what was going on, he claimed, the probe into the subject had to be thorough, transparent, and all-encompassing.
The elder statesman said: “My attention and that of the entire country have been drawn to the recent discovery of a large scale and sophisticated oil theft machinery going on at the deep swamps at Yokri, close to the Forcados terminal in Delta.
“According to reports, high powered technological engineering expertise is applied to steal crude oil from the Forcados line.
“This is transported through a four-kilometre pipeline to a platform in the sea, which belongs to the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), and its partners.”
Clark further quoted the report, which stated that since 2014, daily thefts from there have averaged 200 hundred barrels of crude oil.
“According to NNPCL, this is part of the 470 thousand barrels of crude oil that is being lost every month, amounting to 700 million Dollars.
“Although, the NNPCL thinks these have been going on in the past 20 years, some of us have always insisted that this oil theft has been going on for much longer, for about 50 years.”
According to him, the illegal four-kilometer pipeline through which crude oil was being smuggled showed that mafia-like organizations were responsible for the oil theft, and some individuals working in the oil industry were complicit in it.
“What is going on is a sophisticated criminal act, carried out by a syndicate,” he said.
Clark added that all government officials, especially top NNPCL officials and their allies, who had caused such grave harm to the nation and the Niger Delta villages must be found through the probe.
“It is dangerously incredible that crude oil theft, in spite all the securities around, has assumed wider dimension to the extent that the quantity of crude oil we export today is less than the quantity being stolen by a gang of thieves of various designations.”
