Half a billion liters of petrol worth $250M stolen in Nigeria

As Nigerians suffer from shortage in gas, the country's state-run oil company said vandals and thieves stole 531 million liters of petrol worth $250 million from a single pipeline in the first three quarters of the year.

In a report by The Daily Mail UK, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) announced Thursday that the massive amount of petrol were stolen from the System 2B pipeline, which stretches 250 km from Lagos to Ilorin. NNPC subsidiary Pipelines and Product Marketing Company informed the Senate committee that the stealing of the System 2B pipeline makes it difficult to provide a steady flow of petroleum products to customers through retail outlets.

In a report by BBC, Pipelines and Product Marketing Company managing director Esther Nnamdi Ogbue, "We have been pushing 35 million litres every day to the market and there's no reason why there shouldn't be fuel."

Nigeria is the top oil exporter of Africa. However, it has been importing most of its petrol due to lack of local refining capacity. Fuel shortage has become common in Nigeria. In May it went to a virtual standstill as importers closed depots over subsidy payments.

According to All Africa, as long queues started to build up, fueling station owners started selling petrol products above the official price, which is N87 per liter. In Rivers State, petrol is sold at N250 per liter. This price has become quite normal in most countries in the region. NNPC blames vandalism of pipelines and hoarding by marketers to create an unreal scarcity.

This predicament prompted Ibe Kachikwu, the Petroleum Minister of State and the NNPC Group General Manager, to seal off last Tuesday all the stations involved in hoarding petrol and distributed the products back to the Nigerians for free.

President Muhammadu Buhari urged to stop the subsidy scheme, which is allegedly filled with corruption. However, the last attempt to stop it triggered violent mass protests.