Minister of National Planning, Sanusi Daggash, has said Nigeria loses about $60 billion oil revenue yearly due largely to the decay in infrastructure, bunkering and Niger Delta crisis, among others.
He stated this during a chat with newsmen on Monday at the "2009-2011 Medium Term Sector Strategy (MTSS)" workshop organised by the Federal Ministry Finance and the Budget Office of the Federation in collaboration with the Department for International Development and the World Bank.
Daggash said "the calculation is a simple arithmetic. You have today your theoretical production capacity of about 3.2 million barrel of petroleum or crude oil.
"You have an OPEC ceiling of 2.5 million barrels a day; if you have 3 million capacity they will allow you to produce it.
"Now based on the 2.5 million and we put our budget on 2.4 million bpd. Effectively we are producing an average of about 2 million. So, if you subtract that from 3.2 million barrels a day that is over a million barrels.
"This boils down to about $140 million a day or about $4 to $5 billion loss per month, which the Federal Government gets 85 to 89 per cent of by virtue of sharing.
"On the whole we are yearly losing about $60 billion," Daggash said.
He noted that government was confident that high figure of crude oil prices will remain.
"Even if it doesn’t remain at $140 it can’t go below $90. But the key thing is what do you do with that gap, that is why you have that theoretical account called excess crude, which despite the challenge of the constitution we have to have the kind of safe gap because within a short while we will be able to react."
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