Apparently, nobody knows.
Check this out:
The Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has described the records of the country’s crude production and export as unclear, saying that after 58 years of oil production, the country does not know exactly the quantity it produces.
Speaking at the presentation of a research report on the Nigeria Extractive Industry in Abuja weekend, Chairman of the Board of NEITI, Prof. Asisi Asobie, said despite all the inroads made by the country to expand operations in the oil industry, it had not been able to get operators to tell the truth about the actual oil volumes produced.
“After 58 years of producing oil, Nigeria does not know how much was being produced. It is regrettable that we have not been able to get oil companies to tell Nigerians exactly what they produce. The sector is shrouded in secrecy,” he said.
Read the full piece here.
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Nigeria, as ion the government of Nigeria, the people running the place, not necessarily the millions employed in the government, know exactly how much oil Nigeria produces..what this article is saying really..is that nobody outside of the “people running the place” knows how much oil Nigeria is producing. And even if NEITI were to figure it our, Nigerians the people…will not know how much oil Nigeria is producing.
That is not exactly what the article is saying, and I doubt that the people running Nigeria actually really knows how much oil the country produces. For one, the people administering NNPC and other government agencies have not been the same since oil exploitation began.
Apart from that, from the article, it seems that the oil companies are the ones that report how much they produce to NNPC, which leaves open possibilities for manipulating the figures. Actually, the article mentions 'about $243 million in the areas of under-calculations in terms of royalties; about $340 billion in terms of petroleum profit tax.'
Subsidies are also another component of the calculation that is very problematic. I actually doubt that anybody knows actually how much the country spends on subsidising the importation and consumption of petroleum products in the country.
Add to that the fact that there is illegal bunkering going on in the Niger Delta region, which means that a great deal of oil is sold illegally on the seas.
For more, see my earlier posts here and here.