The Niger Delta Technical Committee has released a damaging report of the effect of sustained militancy on Nigeria’s earnings from oil production which it said dwindled by a whopping $24Billion between January and September, 2008.
Basing its calculations on an average loss of 700,000 barrels per day from January to September, 2009 and multiplied it by the monthly crude oil price, the committee arrived at the shocking figure.
The committee which was inaugurated in December last year by President Umar Yar Adua has since submitted its report, but quoting the report last week a foreign news wire Dow Jones reported that sustained attacks on oil installations led to “shut downs and spillages with consequent losses in revenue estimated at about $20.7 billion.”Dow Jones quoted the Ledum Mitee committee as saying that “this amount (of $20.7 billion) is exclusive of another estimated $3 billion lost to oil bunkering (theft) over the first seven months of this year alone.
”Apart form the revenue loss, “there are unaccounted costs in human misery, with about 1,000 persons killed within the same period and another 300 taken as hostages”, the report disclosed.According to the report, while commenting on the huge revenue and human losses, Ledum Mitee, said that “if we were to buy peace, we would be spending less than what we are losing in the crisis”.
(With agency report)
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