Lawyer and human rights activist, Femi Falana SAN, has described Nigeria’s inaccurate daily oil production records as shameful.
He stated this at an interactive Media Roundtable on the Impact of Non-payment of Capital Gain Tax (CGT) and Other Levies in the Oil and Gas Sector on the Socio-Economic Development of the country, in Lagos.
The roundtable was organised by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).
Falana said the recent report by the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) showed that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and oil majors had yet to remit $22 billion and N481 billion to the Federation Account.
He said, “Nigeria is the only oil producing country that does not know how much crude oil is produced and the government has refused to obtain the meter that would provide an accurate record.
“A study was done between 2011 and 2014 by the Nigerian Maritime dministration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) on how much-unrecorded oil was taken out of Nigeria.
“In one port alone at Philadelphia, United States, the difference between the oil recorded that was taken out from our port and the oil that arrived there was about 60 million barrels valued at $12.7 billion.”
Falana said that the present administration of President Muhammadu Buhari had been recovering stolen funds but they needed to do more to ensure that the humongous amount of money stolen from the oil sector was recovered.
According to him, these funds can be deployed for education, health and infrastructural development in the country, especially as over 13 million children are currently out of school.
He urged SERAP to challenge the non-implementation of the Deep Offshore and Inland Production Act which ought to have been enforced since 1993 but had been jettisoned by subsequent administrations.
“We must go to the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) to ensure that we get the appropriate information as enshrined in the Freedom of Information Act (FOI),” he said.