Decentralise pipeline contract to stop bleeding the economy, Niger Delta stakeholders urge Tinubu

The Niger Delta Roundtable on Saturday rose from an emergency in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, resolving that pipeline contracts in the region should no longer be given to an individual but spread across states and communities to touch on the lives of those that bear the brunt of exploration and securing national assets.

The statement signed by Dr. A. Taro Theophilus said after a careful analysis of how effective the contract has performed it found out that it posted an abysmal failure since illegal bunkering was still held sway in the region while asset vandalism was still common.

“In the first eight months of 2025, Nigeria lost 93.74 million barrels of crude oil and condensate production against its own budget targets. At Bonny Light’s average price of $73.06 per barrel, that is $6.85 billion in revenue that Nigeria produced for no one. These are not opposition figures. They come from the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission’s own data, confirmed by the Central Bank of Nigeria.

“The pipeline surveillance contract was commissioned to prevent exactly this. It has not.

“The 2025 federal budget assumed daily production of 2.06 million barrels. Actual output averaged 1.673 million barrels per day, a shortfall of 390,000 barrels every single day. Nigeria met its OPEC quota of 1.5 million barrels per day in just three months of the entire year. September was the worst, when output fell to 1.39 million barrels per day. By January 2026, six consecutive months into missing its OPEC target, Nigeria was producing 1.459 million barrels per day against a 2026 budget benchmark of 1.84 million.

“The fiscal cascade is direct. In July and August 2025 alone, the oil sector posted a combined revenue gap of N941.23 billion. In August, royalty inflows came in at N682.28 billion against a projection of N1.144 trillion, a single-month hole of N461.89 billion. Measured over seven months against prorated budget targets, the 2025 oil revenue shortfall reached N18.61 trillion. Every naira of that gap is a salary delayed somewhere, a debt serviced through fresh borrowing, a state government receiving less than it planned for”, they pointed out.

According to them, illegal bunkering networks were still active thereby defeating the purpose of the contract.

“The discovery of major illegal refining operations as far inland as Abia State in early 2026 is evidence of a criminal enterprise that has studied the boundaries of the current surveillance model and learned to operate beyond them. A single contractor covers a fixed perimeter. Organised oil theft does not.

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“The deeper structural problem is this: one company holding the surveillance mandate over Nigeria’s entire pipeline network, with no competitive pressure and no enforceable performance standards, has no incentive to outperform. When renewal is inevitable because disruption is too costly to risk, the contract stops being a procurement arrangement and becomes a structural vulnerability embedded in Nigeria’s fiscal architecture.

“The Niger Delta is not uniform. It spans nine states, dozens of ethnic nationalities and hundreds of distinct communities, each with its own intelligence networks and its own knowledge of who moves on the water at night and why. Corridor-specific surveillance, awarded to multiple qualified Niger Delta enterprises each rooted in the communities they protect, would bring that granular local knowledge to bear on a problem that a centralised operation has demonstrably failed to solve.

“It would also distribute the economic benefit of this contract, worth billions of naira annually from the national treasury, across a broader range of Niger Delta enterprises rather than concentrating it in a single structure. And it eliminates the single point of failure the current arrangement represents. If Tantita’s operation is disrupted for any reason, Nigeria has no fallback. The pipelines go unwatched. That is not a risk posture for a country whose budget depends on what flows through those pipes.

They therefore demanded an independent performance audit by the NUPRC and a credible upstream advisory firm, with findings published within ninety days; a transparent, competitive decentralisation of surveillance responsibilities across producing corridors, with enforceable production performance standards and financial penalties for underperformance built into every new agreement and fiscal scrutiny applied to the contract that this government rightly demands of every other item of public expenditure.

“President Tinubu has 37 billion barrels of proven reserves beneath the Niger Delta and an ambition to produce three million barrels per day by 2030. The Niger Delta’s communities are not asking to inherit a problem. They are offering to solve one. They know these waters. They know these pipelines. They know who is stealing and where.

“Decentralise this contract. Give the Niger Delta the mandate and the accountability structure to protect its own resource base. The federation account will feel the difference,” they concluded.