The Federal Government exported crude oil approximately worth N17tn to seven foreign countries over a period of nine months.
Recall that the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission on Tuesday, June 4, 2024, mandated International Oil Companies to supply crude oil to the 650,000-capacity Dangote Petroleum Refinery.
The spokesperson for the NUPRC, Olaide Shonola, had said the commission was intervening to ensure the local sale of crude to Dangote and other refineries in the country.
Shonola made the disclosure following a claim by the Chairman of the Dangote Group that the IOCs were not ready to sell crude to the refinery.
In an interview with CNN, Aliko Dangote had said the IOCs in Nigeria were used to exporting crude for foreign exchange and they were not ready to stop.
Dangote said though the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd was doing its best to supply feedstock to the refinery, the IOCs wanted to sell outside the country.
“The NNPC is doing its best, but some of the IOCs, they are struggling to give us crude, everybody is used to exporting and nobody wants to stop exporting,” he stated.
The business mogul said Africa was not growing because it sells raw materials to the Western world and buys the same as finished goods.
“Africa is not going the way it should because we export raw and import finished goods. It doesn’t matter what it is, even if it is gold or whatever, raw material is always priced at a ridiculous amount compared to finished goods,” Dangote said.
However, investigation by Saturday PUNCH showed that between July 2023 and March 2024, Nigeria exported crude oil worth N16.9tn to foreign countries which include the United States of America, France, India, Indonesia, Canada, Spain and The Netherlands.
This worth of crude oil exported by Nigeria to the countries during the nine-month period was contained in the various Commodity Prices Indices & Terms of Trade reports released by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics for the third and fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024.
The report for Q1 2024 released by the NBS on Monday, June 24, 2024, stated, “The All-Commodity Group Import Index for Q1, 2024 on average increased by 0.51 per cent. The increase can be attributed to the changes in import prices of vehicles, aircraft.
“The All-Commodity Group Export price index increased on average by 0.39 per cent in Q1, 2024. The increase was majorly attributed to changes in the prices of mineral products, products of the chemical and allied industries, plastic, rubber etc.”
