Oil workers in the country have blamed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation for complicity in recent pipeline fire incidents across the country due to the absence of an effective pipeline monitoring system.
The President, Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, Mr. Peter Esele, in an interview with our correspondent on Tuesday, alleged that the corporation had no effective system to monitor burst pipelines.
He was speaking against the background of the recent pipeline fire incidents including Tuesday�s fire at Abule-Egba, Lagos, which claimed many lives.
Esele alleged that there was no system in place to detect that the pipeline had been broken and that even though NNPC might have been informed about the vandalisation and people scooping fuel from the site, the corporation response was not immediate.
�The bureaucratic bottleneck of the government system is seriously affecting the operations of the NNPC and this has been dictating the way the corporation respond to burst pipelines,� he noted.
He said that the NNPC should emulate other corporations in other parts of the world where rusted and broken pipelines were discovered immediately and remedial process put in place without delay.
�The NNPC should put in place a technology that will enable it discover any area where there is a burst pipeline and be ready to mobilise its resources to repair any rusted or burst pipeline as its done in order parts of the world,� he said.
He said that the government and the NNPC should stop passing the buck and device more effective means of apprehending vandals, and quick repairs of damaged pipelines.
He also criticised the law enforcement agents, especially the police, for not effecting arrest of those involved in the acts.
On the fuel scarcity in the country, Esele said the increase on the prices of petroleum products was not even on the agenda during the last meeting of the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency.
He blamed the festering fuel scarcity on the hoarding by petrol filling stations, especially, the independent marketers.
He alleged, �The police and the Department of Petroleum Resources that is supposed to effect the arrest of owners of petrol filling stations and closing down of such stations have not been performing their duties as expected.
�It seems there is connivance between these agencies and the petrol filling stations� owners to continue to exploit Nigerians by hoarding fuel because most stations now have fuel and the prices that NNPC sell the products to them has not changed.�