The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on Wednesday described its expenditure on the fixing of vandalised pipelines as burdensome and unnecessary.
The Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Dr Joseph Dawha, said this in Abuja while fielding questions from newsmen.
Dawha was clarifying the highlights of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Forensic Audit Report which directed the corporation to reduce its unnecessary expenditure.
He said the huge debt incurred on stolen crude and fixing of the damaged pipelines occasioned by acts of sabotage was uncalled for.
He said NNPC was operating under a very difficult environment and there was no special budget for the fixing of vandalised pipelines which had to be done whenever the occasion arose.
“I quite agree with you that some expenditure is unnecessary especially when they are sabotage.
“We operate under very difficult environments; expenditure of fixing pipelines and accounting for crude that were deliberately stolen are not expenditure the nation can afford.
“We will rather have a system whereby crude is put in the pipeline and arrives at its destination and they are refined.
“This is a normal operation but we are really in abnormal operation,” he said.
He said vandalism had been a major challenge the corporation had been facing in the last few months.
Similarly, the Group Executive Director, Gas and Power, Dr David Ige, said vandalism was one of the biggest threats to NNPC operations and aspiration of the Federal Government.
“Over the last six months, we have been confronted with over 50 cases of pipeline attacks across the crude oil pipeline and gas pipelines.
“The latest which just happened about 24 hours ago is the Lagos-Escravous pipeline; each of these attacks caused us significant amount of money to repair.
“The pipelines are located in a very difficult terrain to access; if there is an attack on the pipeline the logistic of getting it repaired is expensive.
“We continue to bear the cost of this which we consider to be unnecessary; we are struggling with this problem; since January alone we have seen more attacks more than often,” Ige said.