According to an article published by the BBC this time last year, Abubakar Yar’Adua of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was left to defend comments that may or may not have been said regarding the long-standing belief that militants residing in Nigeria are being paid to protect the oil infrastructure. In his defense, Yar’Adua later stated that he had been misunderstood, and that there was no money that transferred from the hands of the NNPC to militants.  However, one militant group responded by threatening that they would blow up a pipeline…so maybe there was more to it than what was said (or not said).

Soon afterwards, public hearings were held to investigate the possible ongoing corruption in the petroleum sector of the Nigerian government.  According to the article, Yar’Adua told the parliamentary committee that rebels had asked for a specific sum of money in the total of six million dollars per month.  Yar’Adua was also quoted as stating that the company decided to pay the militants in order to protect the oil facilities that had been sabotaged by militants after it lost $81million worth of oil in a couple of months.

These militant attacks on Nigeria’s oil infrastructure have caused the NNPC to lose money by way of having to cut oil production.

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