The director-general, National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency(NOSDRA), Mr. Peter Nduka, has disclosed that pipeline vandals and crude oil thieves in the Niger Delta are aided and protected by members of the armed forces.
Nduka made the revelation on Thursday at an interactive session with the House of Representatives’ Committee on Environment.
“We have discovered that members of our so-called armed forces are providing cover and materials for these gangs of oil thieves in the Niger Delta for monetary gains,” he claimed.
Nduka also told the Committee that the NOSDRA, an agency established by an Act of the National Assembly in 2006 to monitor and respond to oil spills, has had to depend on the Republic of Ghana for emergency responses to oil spillages.
LEADERSHIP SUNDAY can exclusively reveal that the Committee, in that session, also heard how the NOSDRA has had a long battle with the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and other agencies over the perennial overlap of functions.?
Nduka disclosed that his agency had taken the DPR and the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC) to court over incessant oil-related clashes.
“As we talk now, the DPR and, especially, the PPMC, pose the most problems to the NOSDRA, in terms of oversight. These agencies under the Ministry of Petroleum have, on several occasions, even threatened to frustrate us. They have even threatened before to influence the petrol tanker drivers to embark on a strike action to frustrate us,” he claimed.
Nduka also claimed that Shell Petroleum Development Company alone had a record of 513 oil spills over the last couple of years and that the spills were yet to abate. The agency also fingered the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Agency (NESREA) s another obstacle to the goals of the NOSDRA.
However, the Committee, shortly before it went into a close session, accused the agency, as well as those which it claimed were hindering it from performing its oversight functions, of unwholesome practices. The chairman, the House Committee on Environment, Hon. Uche Ekwunife, and his colleagues took turns to berate the NOSDRA boss for what they considered his unwillingness to tackle the multiple problems encountered by the Agency, and also queried the agency for failing to realise the N68m accumulated by the SPDC and other oil companies as fines for oil spillages in communities around the oil-producing region.