This article presents a comprehensive examination of the chronic issue of oil theft in Nigeria, highlighting systemic corruption within the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and the broader implications for governance, accountability, and national welfare. ODIMEGWU ONWUMERE chronicles the evolution of oil theft in the organization from a mere financial crime to an institutionalized practice, emphasizing the connection between high-level corruption and the pervasive poverty affecting millions of Nigerians. The article traces key reports from the Senate revealing staggering sums of unaccounted oil revenues, illustrating the cyclical nature of discovery, outrage, and bureaucratic inaction that underscores Nigeria’s oil sector dysfunction

It is not merely a story about missing money — it is a mirror held up to the Nigerian state, reflecting how systemic corruption, institutional deceit, and elite impunity have hollowed out Africa’s largest economy from within.

Its significance lies in the uncomfortable truths it forces to the surface, truths that go beyond the oil wells and balance sheets to the very architecture of governance and nationhood.

At its heart, it exposes the NNPCL not as a mismanaged corporation but as the single most enduring symbol of Nigeria’s structural dysfunction.

It shows that the corruption within the oil industry is not incidental — it is intentional, engineered through bureaucratic loopholes, weak oversight, and decades of political complicity.

Each revelation, from the 2011 KPMG audit to the 2025 Senate report, demonstrates how theft has evolved from an act into an institution.

The narrative also carries a moral weight. It draws a direct line between economic sabotage at the top and human suffering at the bottom.

Every stolen dollar is a hospital unbuilt, a school unfunded, a job unrealized. The shoddy significance lies in connecting grand corruption to the insecurity, poverty, and disillusionment that define daily life for millions of Nigerians.

It forces the public to see that oil theft is not an abstract financial crime — it is the theft of opportunity, dignity, and future.

Politically, the investigation captures the ongoing war between truth and propaganda — between reformers demanding transparency and entrenched powers hiding behind slogans of “transformation.”

It shows how state institutions like the Senate, the EFCC, and the NNPCL are locked in a struggle not only for control of resources but for control of the national narrative itself.

On the fifth of November, 2025, the Nigerian Senate did what it does with alarming, tragic regularity. It announced the impossible. It confirmed the absurd. It held up a mirror to the nation, and the reflection was a grotesque portrait of systemic failure.

The Senate Ad-hoc Committee investigating crude oil theft, a group reconstituted just nine months prior, released an interim report that was not so much an investigation as it was a post-mortem of a looted treasury.

The numbers were astronomical, floating into a realm of abstraction that defies human comprehension. The committee had uncovered, it said, about N300 billion in “unaccounted crude oil proceeds.” This was just the domestic-sale-sized appetizer.

The report went on, detailing massive discrepancies, mismatches, and a shortfall of $81 billion between what the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) claimed it received and what the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) actually recorded for just two years, 2016 and 2017.

Then came the global figure. Supported by international consultants, the committee projected that since 2015, over $200 billion in crude oil sales proceeds remained “unaccounted for globally.”

Two hundred billion dollars. Three hundred billion naira. Eighty-one billion dollars. The figures swam together, a tidal wave of missing money, in a country where the 2025 national budget for 220 million people hovered around N27.5 trillion, or roughly $27.5 billion.

The theft was not just a leak; it was a hemorrhage. The artery of the nation had been severed. And yet, the most jarring part of the announcement was not the numbers themselves, but the deafening echo they produced.

This bombshell had landed just five months after the NNPC Ltd., under a brand-new leadership, had launched a full-throated, preemptive public relations war. On June 27th, 2025, the state oil company had issued a remarkable public notice, a masterclass in corporate deflection. It claimed to have “uncovered an emerging coordinated sabotage campaign” waged by “a syndicate of known and faceless actors, both outside and within various levels of the organisation.”

This mysterious group, the NNPC alleged, was “actively spreading lies and misinformation simply to discredit NNPC Ltd.’s leadership and derail the organisation’s ongoing transformation into a corruption-free, performance-driven energy company.”

The notice was a call to arms for patriots: “Ignore the noise,” it pleaded. “The transformation is underway, and no amount of sabotage will stop it.”

So here, in the dimming light of 2025, was the central, soul-crushing question: Who is actually spreading lies? Was the Senate Ad-hoc Committee part of this “faceless syndicate”? Were the international consultants “saboteurs”? Or was the N300 billion, the $81 billion, the $200 billion, the “noise” the NNPC was warning everyone to ignore? The answer, it seems, is etched in a history of identical warnings, identical audits, and identical, astronomical thefts that have become the defining feature of the Nigerian state. This was not a new story. It was a sequel, a reboot, and a rerun, all at once.

To understand the sheer audacity of the 2025 scandal, one must first understand that the NNPC, as an institution, has been a “house of corruption” for longer than many Nigerians have been alive. The playbook for this theft is old, worn, and depressingly simple. The Senate report of November 2025 traced the problem to the same culprits: faulty measurement systems, weak regulatory oversight, and poor coordination.

It specifically identified the “use of unverified measuring instruments,” a “lack of metrological control,” and “ineffective interagency collaboration.” In the simplest possible terms: Nigeria does not know how much oil it pumps, and the state-owned company in charge of selling it has, for decades, preferred it this way.

The report faulted the suspension of the Weights and Measures Department’s activities in the upstream sector under the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021. This single bureaucratic decision, buried in legislation, was not just an oversight; it was the equivalent of firing all the bank tellers, disabling the security cameras, and leaving the vault door wide open, all while claiming the bank was now “transformed.”

The committee's recommendations were a laundry list of common-sense solutions that have been proposed, ignored, and proposed again for decades: enforce international crude oil measurement standards, buy some drones, create a special court for oil thieves, and for God’s sake, implement the Host Communities Development Trust Fund to give local communities a reason not to sabotage the pipelines.

But even as the Senate presented this, it revealed its own impotence. It directed the committee to “name the oil thieves,” but stressed, in a moment of tragic clarity, that “it is not its job to recover stolen funds.”

The cycle was complete: discovery, public outrage, bureaucratic buck-passing, and, inevitably, inaction. The thieves would remain unnamed, the funds unrecovered.

This sense of déjà vu is not a feeling; it is a documented fact. One only needs to rewind the clock. Go back to 2016. An official audit by the nation’s Auditor General declared that the same NNPC had failed to pay the government $16 billion. Sixteen billion dollars. An amount equivalent to more than two-thirds of the national budget at the time. The Auditor General told Parliament that the NNPC provided “no explanation for the missing funds.”

This was the era when the then-Central Bank Governor, Lamido Sanusi, had his career immolated for daring to point out that billions of dollars were “missing.” He was not a saboteur; he was a mathematician. He was also fired. This was the curse of Nigerian oil, the blessing that became a lubricant for a generation of “massive corruption and dysfunctional governments.”

This was the theft that the then President Muhammadu Buhari had been elected, just one year prior, to stop. And yet, here, nearly a decade later, the numbers were not just recurring; they were growing.

But even the 2016 audit was just an echo of an even more damning revelation. To find the true genesis of the modern NNPC’s playbook, you must travel back to 2011, to a 41-page report that the Nigerian government tried to bury with all its might.

In July 2010, following furious allegations from the 36 state governors that the NNPC was “wrongfully deducting” their money, the Federal Ministry of Finance, then led by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, hired the renowned international audit firm KPMG to look at the books.

What KPMG found was so explosive, so “damning,” that the NNPC and the Ministry of Petroleum worked furiously to frustrate the auditors. They failed to supply evaluation criteria for contracts. They failed to provide lists of approved importers.

They hid the keys to every closet. But the auditors, piecing together the scraps, painted a picture of a corporation that was not just corrupt, but fundamentally fraudulent in its very design.

The KPMG report, eventually leaked by Premium Times after Okonjo-Iweala was given a seven-day ultimatum by the Senate to produce it, was a blueprint for institutional theft.

It detailed, in painstaking, soul-crushing detail, the exact same mechanisms the 2025 Senate committee would “uncover” fourteen years later. KPMG found that the NNPC was “stealing the states blind” in two primary, brilliantly simple ways.

First was subsidy fraud. The auditors found that the NNPC was in the “habit of arbitrarily estimating subsidy claims and then over-deducting funds.”

For example, in September 2009, NNPC “estimated” the subsidy at N25 billion and deducted that amount from the Federation Account. The actual, approved subsidy from the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) was only N23.8 billion.

In November 2009, it was even more brazen: NNPC deducted N35 billion, while the approved figure was N21.3 billion. The over-deduction for just those two months, a hole in the public purse, was N14.9 billion.

In total, between 2007 and 2009, KPMG found the NNPC had over-deducted N28.5 billion. This was money that should have gone to states to build schools, hospitals, and roads, but it simply vanished Into the NNPC’s opaque ledgers.

The second scam was even more elegant, a “fraudulent underhand tactic” that preyed on the national currency. By regulation, the NNPC was invoiced in US dollars for domestic crude oil but was expected to remit the equivalent naira value to the Federation Account.

The auditors found, to their “chagrin,” that the NNPC was consistently using exchange rates far lower than the official rates published by the Central Bank of Nigeria. When KPMG demanded an explanation for this disparity, the NNPC claimed it had “obtained the exchange rates it used from the CBN via telephone.”

This single, absurd excuse—a verbal, untraceable phone call—was used to justify the theft of N85.2 billion over three years. N25.7 billion in 2007. N33.8 billion in 2008. N26.7 billion in 2009.

The rot was total. The KPMG report detailed how crude oil sale contracts were renewed with no clear criteria. It found that some companies not even on the approved list of buyers were allocated millions of barrels of Nigerian crude.

The report named them: Ovlas Trading, which received 2.8 million barrels in 2007 and 906,000 in 2008; Petrojam, which received 2.8 million barrels in 2007; Oil Fields, with 950,000 barrels; and Zenon, with 906,000 barrels. This was not a market; it was a cartel, where “selection exercises were based on individual discretion.”

In another detail of pure, unadulterated graft, the auditors found that DPK tanks at the PPMC depot in Mosimi, with a storage capacity of 18,000 cubic meters, had sat empty but in “good condition” for three years.

During that same period, the NNPC was incurring additional costs by leasing storage facilities from third parties. It was a corporation actively paying more to not use its own assets. It was, as the 2012 headline screamed, a “house of corruption.”

This is the history. This is the context. Now, rewind to 2025. On April 2nd, President Bola Tinubu removed Mele Kyari as the Group Chief Executive Officer of the NNPC and appointed Bayo Ojulari. A “new” leadership, a “new” mandate. And just two months later, on June 27th, this new leadership issues its grand proclamation: “The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd.) has uncovered an emerging coordinated sabotage campaign… This group is actively spreading lies and misinformation… to discredit NNPC Ltd.’s leadership and derail the organisation’s ongoing transformation into a corruption-free… energy company.”

Viewed against the backdrop of the KPMG report, the 2016 audit, and the Sanusi affair, this statement is not just defensive; it is a breathtaking piece of institutional gaslighting. The "transformation" It speaks of is the same transformation that has been promised for decades. The “saboteurs” it blames are the same boogeymen used to attack auditors, whistleblowers, and senate committees. The "lies and misinformation” it decries are, almost certainly, the same inconvenient truths that KPMG and the Auditor General had published years before.

The NNPC was not just fighting back; it was building a fortress of propaganda, bracing for the impact of the “surge of defamatory content” it knew was coming. It knew, because the books were still a mess. It knew, because the system was still broken. It knew, because the November 5th Senate report was already in the pipeline.

And then, as if to underscore the absurdity, the real watchdog finally bared its teeth. On July 10th, 2025, just two weeks after the NNPC’s “saboteur” press release, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, stood before the National Conference on Public Accounts and delivered a speech that was less a report and more a desperate plea for help.

“In the last three weeks,” Olukoyede announced, “we launched a commission-wide investigation into the extractive industry, particularly the oil and gas sector. What we have discovered is mind-boggling. And we have only just opened the books. If this is what we’re seeing at the surface, imagine what lies beneath.”

Here was the head of the nation’s financial crimes agency, not speaking of “transformation,” but of “mind-boggling” corruption, at the exact same time the NNPC was claiming to be a victim of reformers. Olukoyede, unlike the NNPC, was not speaking in vague allusions.

He was drawing a direct, bloody line from the air-conditioned offices of the oil thieves to the violent chaos paralyzing the nation.

“There is a very strong connection between the mismanagement of our resources and insecurity,” he stated flatly.

“When you look at banditry, kidnapping, terrorism, trace it back, and you will find a pattern of corrupt practices and diversion of funds meant to improve people’s lives.”

This was the “noise” the NNPC wanted Nigeria to ignore. It was the EFCC chairman himself, confirming that the rot was deeper than ever. This was not the first time the EFCC and the NNPC had been at odds, but the proximity of their statements in 2025 was a public, spectacular clash of narratives.

And Olukoyede was not finished. He turned his frustration to the political class, to the very senators and representatives sitting before him. “Help me pass the Unexplained Wealth Bill,” he begged.

“I’ve been begging for the past year. This same bill was thrown out in the last Assembly.

“If we don’t make individuals accountable for what they own, we’ll never get it right.”

He painted a simple, devastating picture: “Someone has worked in a ministry for 20 years. We calculate their entire salary and allowances. Then we find five properties—two in Maitama, three in Asokoro. Yet we’re told to go and prove a predicate offence before we can act. That is absurd.”

He was a man chasing ghosts, not with a net, but with a piece of string. He spoke of chasing Nigeria’s stolen assets across the globe:

“Last month alone, I visited four or five countries… An ambassador even told me they discovered an estate in Iceland owned by a Nigerian. Iceland of all places!”

But his chase was ending in frustration. “There is no amount of capacity I can build,” he confessed, “no level of effort I can put in, that will enable me to recover even half of what has been stolen… because the custodians of those assets in foreign countries don’t want to let go.”

While the EFCC chairman was begging for legal tools, the National Assembly’s own Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was grappling with a number so large, so impossibly vast, that it threatened to eclipse all other scandals combined.

In June 2025, the same month the NNPC issued its “saboteur” warning, the Senate PAC had queried the company over N210 trillion allegedly unaccounted for in its audited financial statements between 2017 and 2023. This number was not a rounding error. It was not a discrepancy. It was a parallel dimension. It was multiple times the nation’s entire GDP.

The committeee demanded a detailed explanation for the whereabouts of these funds within seven days. The NNPC's Chief Financial Officer, Adedapo Segun, and other top officials, did not comply. They “were attending a retreat.” They requested an additional 20 days. The committee, in a rare show of spine, rejected the request and issued a new 10-day ultimatum. This was the “transformation” in action: a N210 trillion question met with a request for a 20-day extension.

And so, we arrive back at November 5, 2025. The Senate’s “new” discovery of an “unaccounted” N300 billion feels almost quaint, a rounding error on the N210 trillion black hole. The $200 billion missing globally since 2015 is just the international wing of the same monstrous theft.

The "calculated efforts by those who feel threatened by reform,” as the NNPC put it, were not coming from “faceless actors.” They were coming from the Senate Ad-hoc Committee. They were coming from the Senate Public Accounts Committee. And they were coming from the Chairman of the EFCC. The NNPC's ”transformation” was, in reality, a war against transparency, a public relations campaign to rebrand an institution that, by all independent accounts, was still the greatest single obstacle to Nigeria’s survival.

The true "sabotage" Is not the “defamatory content” the NNPC fears. The true sabotage is the N210 trillion that is not in the treasury. It is the $200 billion that is not building hospitals. It is the N85.2 billion siphoned through phantom phone calls. It is the N28.5 billion “over-deducted” from state coffers. It is the abandoned oil wells, mentioned in the Senate’s report, that are still leaking oil and gas into the Niger Delta, poisoning communities while the nation’s leaders squabble over the spoils.

The NNPC, In its June 2025 statement, was correct about one thing: “We remain on mission.” The question every Nigerian must ask is, what, precisely, has that mission ever been? The evidence of 2011, 2016, and 2025, gathered by KPMG, by the Auditor General, by the Senate, and by the EFCC, suggests that the mission has never been reform.

It has been a mission of extraction, opacity, and self-preservation, a mission that has left a nation rich in oil but poor in everything else. The “saboteurs” are not the ones spreading lies. The lie is the transformation itself.

•Onwumere is Chairman Advocacy Network On Religious And Cultural Coexistence (ANORACC).