The Niger Delta Congress (NDC) has expressed outrage over “revelations of grand theft” made by the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation (OAuGF) against the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

In a statement on Wednesday, NDC spokesman, Ovunda Eni cited the 2019 audit report which indicted the corporation and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources for “missing 107,000,000 barrels of crude oil”.

Eni said the findings have thwarted the attempts of NNPC leadership to blame the reduction in crude oil earnings on artisanal refiners and illegal bunkerers as a ruse.

The NDC accused the state-owned company of engaging in what appears to be an officially sanctioned and well organised larceny of crude on a scale that artisanal refiners and their collaborators are currently incapable of.

Eni noted that a breakdown of the 100 million barrels of crude oil not accounted for in 2019 amounts to over N2 trillion lost to “criminal activities in the NNPC and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources”.

The funds, according to him, would have been directly beneficial to the Niger Delta people “who own the resources and the generality of Nigerians”.

The statement said the figure in question is worth a quarter of Nigeria’s 2019 budget estimate, over 60% of expected crude oil earnings for 2019, and over 85% of 2019 combined earnings of the six Niger Delta states from the Federation Account.

“That such high level theft of an entire quarter of Nigeria’s crude production could go unnoticed and unaddressed for over two years not only shows the depths to which the nation has sunk, but also proves the NDC position that the NNPC in times past and under the leadership of Mele Kyari has operated solely as a criminal enterprise backed by the government.

“The NDC would like to state that the actions of the NNPC under Kyari are unacceptable to the nationalities of the Niger Delta who bear the brunt and carry the weight of Nigeria’s political economy, and calls for the immediate sack and prosecution of the entire leadership of the NNPC by the Minister of Petroleum and President Muhammadu Buhari.

“We believe that any action short of this will prove to the world that the NNPC did not work alone but hand-in-glove with the Ministry of Petroleum, manned by the President himself and his Minister of State for Petroleum; even this won’t be a surprise to us”, Eni added.