One million barrels of crude stolen daily — Ahmad Lawan
Written by City Radio on October 7, 2022
The President of the Senate Ahmad Lawan says Nigeria loses one million barrels of crude oil daily to crude theft.
He made the remarks at the presentation of the 2023 Appropriation Bill to a joint session of the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja on Friday.
Lawan said that the Nigerian economy was still challenged by a dearth of revenues and the situation was worsened recently, culminating in the loss of one million barrels of crude per day.
The senate president also said that the figure represented an estimated total revenue fall from N1.1 trillion recorded in the last quarter of 2021 to N790 billion in the first quarter of this year.
He said the situation had become more worrisome if factored in, an estimated budget deficit of N7 trillion with its grim prospect of increasing to about N11.30 trillion, as presented in the 2023 – 2025 Medium Term Expenditure Framework/Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF/FSP).
The senate president, however, said that the budget deficit could be reduced by stopping the theft.
Other options, he said, included removing some major revenue-generating agencies from direct funding by placing them on the cost of collection of revenues, as was done for the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS).
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