ECONOMY FACES COLLAPSE, ACN WARNS

In a statement issued in Lagos on yesterday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party warned that if the listed measures were not taken, the government may not be able to pay its bills, including workers' salaries, within the next few years.

''Contrary to what the FG may say, this warning is not about cryingwolf but is actually borne out of a patriotic fervour devoid of politicking, which is the usual refrain of this government when alerted to its shortcomings,'' it said.

''We will like to be proven wrong, but this will depend on uncommon and monumental effort, rather than on the basis of the usual canned response from the government.

''ACN said the red alert was based on four empirical evidence: The cost of oil production which has skyrocketed from 4 dollars per barrel in 2002 to 35 dollars presently; the massive corruption in the oil sector, with oil theft and sabotage leading to lost production and costing Nigeria some 6 billion dollars annually in crude theft;the sharp fall in the discovery of new oil and gas reserves due to the low investment in the sector, and the most serious of all, the challenge posed by alternative sources of global supply of oil and gas.The party said the cost of oil production rose from only 4 dollars per barrel in 2002 to 7 dollars per barrel in 2005, and from the 12 dollars per barrel at the onset of the Yar'Adua/Jonathan Administration in 2012 to 35 dollars per barrel in 2012, according to the just-concluded Nigeria Oil and Gas Conference in Abuja, where the mind-boggling cost hike was attributed to the cost of security in the Niger Delta (put at 16 dollars per barrel), it said.''In other words, the gains recorded from ending militancy in the Niger Delta due to the Amnesty Programme have been wiped off by the cost of maintaining the 'peace'. Here is how Shell Nigeria MD Mutiu Sunmonu described the situation: 'Operating in the Nigerian oil and gas environment can be long and tortuous with costs at the high end of the global scale.

There are a multitude of security related issues that have to be dealt with on a daily basis. 'In the recent past, militancy has simply been replaced by industrial scale oil theft and sabotage(emphasis ours). We, and others, have had to shut-in significant production; spend huge amounts onreplacing and repairing hardware and deploying massive resourcesto clean up spills.'