The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, made this known while speaking on Trust TV, despite only nine months to the end of Buhari’s eight-year spell.
The Nigerian government under President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday said it would soon reveal the identities of important personalities and “big men” behind oil theft in the country.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, made this known while speaking on Trust TV, despite only nine months to the end of Buhari’s eight-year spell.
Shehu asserted that as part of efforts to rid the country’s economy from sabotage of greedy few, security operatives had raided locations where illegal oil bunkering thrive.
He explained that there might be cases of some law enforcement agents engaging in the illegal act, but said that new measures were being taken to put a stop to it.
He said, “Oil theft is being tackled. The big problem we have in this country is that we ought to see more commitment from communities in assisting law enforcement agents. In some cases, where some actors in the law enforcement are complicit, it becomes bad.
"It was embarrassing for Nigeria not to meet up with the quota given to it by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
“We used to fight the OPEC for more quotas; now, they have given us and we are not able to meet up. This is embarrassing. Security agencies are fully involved in stopping this act. I am hopeful that in the next few days, the office of the National Security Adviser will be presenting to the country, big men who are promoters of this kind of business as they are being caught and illegal refineries are being bombed out.”
“The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited is also installing a monitoring capacity to detect or advise immediately when sabotage of oil pipelines happen,” he said.