Founder and chairman of Heirs Energies, an upstream oil and gas company, Tony Elumelu says the government and security agencies in Nigeria should be able to tell Nigerians those who steal the country’s crude oil.
He made his comment in an interview published by the Financial Times (FT) on Friday.
The businessman said oil theft contributed to the divestment of international oil companies in Nigeria.
“Who is behind the theft, I ask. It’s a question that has confounded many Nigerians,” he said.
“This is oil theft, we’re not talking about stealing a bottle of Coke you can put in your pocket.
“The government should know, they should tell us. Look at America — Donald Trump was shot at and quickly they knew the background of who shot him. Our security agencies should tell us who is stealing our oil. You bring vessels to our territorial waters and we don’t know?”
In the year 2010, Elumelu established Heirs Holdings, an investment company.
In 2021, he decided to buy a 45 percent stake in oil mining lease (OML) 17.
The business mogul, whilst speaking to FT on buying an oil asset in an age of energy transition, stated that the company wanted to become a Fortune 500 company and “we estimated what we needed”.
“It’s not naira, it’s huge dollars. Energy security is crucial for a country that doesn’t produce enough electricity for its roughly 200mn citizens,” he said.
Elumelu disclosed that Heirs Holdings had been trying to buy an oilfield since 2017, noting that $2.5 billion was raised for it.
Nonetheless, he mentioned that former President Muhmmadu Buhari and his chief of staff, Abba Kyari, “blocked the deal”.
The Heirs Holding Chairman said he was informed that Nigeria could not allow something of such strategic importance to fall into the hands of a private operator.
Elumelu said such idea defied logic, since he would have been buying it from a foreign company.
The businessman also said that he soon discovered first-hand why international oil companies (IOCs) were partially divesting from onshore assets –after criminal gangs began stealing crude from his pipelines.
Back in 2022, when things got to a certain level where his company had to stop production, Elumelu vented his frustration on social media, tweeting: “How can we be losing over 95% of oil production to thieves?”
On July 2, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited declared a state of emergency on the production of crude oil.
Mele Kyari, the group chief executive officer (GCEO) of NNPC, whilst making the announcement, said war has been declared on the challenges affecting Nigeria’s crude oil production.
He stated that the national oil firm has the right tools, “knows what to fight” and what it needs “to do at the level of assets”.