Civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has called on President Bola Tinubu on Saturday to form an independent panel to investigate oil bunkering and related crimes in Nigeria, particularly from 2015 to the present.
HURIWA, in a statement issued by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, said the government should not spare the culprits identified at the end of the investigation, but rather name and shame them and severely sanction them.
The group’s call comes just hours after a prominent Niger Delta leader, Mujahid Asari Dokubo, accused the Nigerian Army and Navy of being complicit in oil theft in the oil-rich Niger-Delta region.
The Nigerian Army has since responded to the allegations, saying it has been vigorously engaged in the fight against illegal oil bunkering, oil theft, illegal oil refining, and other sundry crimes in the region with positive results.
Also, the Nigerian Navy has challenged Dokubo to produce the names of officers involved in crude oil theft.
In its reaction, HURIWA’s Onwubiko said, “The allegations by Dokubo are startling and damning and these allegations must be thoroughly investigated.
“We ask that the President set up a seven-man independent panel of criminologists drawn from reputable global fora to investigate the larger cases of crude oil thefts from 2015-2023.
The panel should identify, prosecute and sanction culprits in the severest of mechanisms and recover to the last dollar public funds diverted through those stolen crude oil by these rogues no matter their statuses.
Also, Dokubo, who made the allegations must provide irrefutable evidence or be prosecuted for providing false information which is a criminal offence.
For years, oil theft has been a cancerous tumor in Nigeria. Last October, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited announced the discovery of an illegal oil connection from Forcados Terminal that had been operational for nine years, with approximately 600,000 barrels per day of oil lost during that time.
