Nigeria is poised to hit the Guinness Book of Records with its endless string of inglorious firsts. With 122 million deprived compatriots toiling below poverty line, Nigeria is the invincible global headquarters of poverty.
Nigeria musters the world’s highest number of children of school age outside classrooms. They are 13.5 million.
It has the world’s highest child and maternal mortality rates. Nigeria has one of the world’s highest unemployment rates. The figure stands menacingly at 33.3 per cent and there are fears that worsening security crisis, epileptic power supply and unbridled corruption would escalate it perilously close to 40 per cent by the end of 2021.
Nigeria is equally the country with the highest number of people without access to electricity. It recently snatched the inglorious crown from DR Congo.
Nigeria leads the world in pipeline vandalisation and crude oil theft.
With 200, 000 barrels of crude oil stolen every day, Nigeria practically has no second in the heinous crime. Mexico comes a far distant second in global crude oil theft with a scant 10, 000 barrels per day.
Crude oil theft is big business in Nigeria. In 2016 alone the federal government lost N3.8 trillion or 50 per cent of annual budget to oil theft.
Crude oil theft and pipelines vandalisation have persisted because Nigeria is always moving in the wrong direction. With budget deficit almost 60 per cent of government annual revenue, one expects the federal government to pursue crude oil theft with the fury of a wounded lion.
Ironically no one in the federal government sees the loss of revenue to crude oil thieves as a major reason for the liquidity crisis plaguing the economy. The federal government has a reprehensible way of moving around problems rather than tackling them frontally.
When Niger Republic refused to use Nigerian ports for its imports and exports because of extortion on the roads by Nigeria police and customs officials, the federal government opted to build a $2 billion railway to Maraba in Niger, rather than ordering the extortionists out of the roads.
When Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) mercilessly swindled the federation account by putting daily petrol consumption figure at 102 million liters instead of the established figure of 38.2 million liters, government tinkered with the idea of raising petrol price to N403 per liter to end smuggling which NNPC blamed for its fraudulent figures. No one could call NNPC to order.
The same strategy of moving around problems rather than tackling it frontally is what emboldens crude oil thieves. A handful of political paramours of the ruling class rake in billions daily from crude oil theft.
The operators of the primitive “evaporation and condensation” refineries in the creeks of Niger Delta also benefit marginally from the crime. They steal a few hundred barrels of crude oil from vandalized pipelines and process it into diesel for sale in the black market.
The big time crude oil thieves do not break into pipelines to steal the crude. They get their share of the crude oil at the export terminals and haul it to international waters where they sell at a discount to criminals dealing illegally in crude oil.
This set of crude oil thieves are the principal operators pillaging Nigeria’s revenue and rendering the country practically bankrupt. The federal government cannot pretend not to know the high velocity crude oil thieves in the country.
Conversely, Pipeline vandalisation and pocket-size oil theft thrive on the collaboration of government security agencies, employees of oil firms and host communities in some instances.
Oil firms’ security patrol teams are backed by heavily armed soldiers. On several occasions, they spot trucks carting away crude oil but are paid to look the other way while the vandals vanish with their loots.
The pocket-size oil thieves are armed with raw cash to pay off the oil firm’s security patrol teams when they are caught. Since they could be several security teams patrolling the pipeline targeted by the oil thieves, the bribe money is spread thin to accommodate everyone challenging the thieves.
In some instances, a security patrol team intercepting a truck laden with crude oil could collect as little as N25, 000 from the thieves.
The remuneration of the men in the security patrol teams of the oil firms is a major factor in their ineffectiveness against the oil thieves. Most of the people in the security patrol teams are casual workers whose monthly pay amounts to pittance judging from oil industry standards. Their job is not pensionable. They retire into penury at the dusk of life. Consequently, they easily compromise because they have no stake in the industry.
The middlemen who recruited them take a huge chunk of what the oil firms allocate to them, leaving them with take-home-pays that cannot actually take them home.
The security patrol teams have no business with the mega oil thieves because they do not steal from pipelines. The mega thieves are known only to NNPC officials and top officials of the petroleum resources ministry. These set of powerful thieves can only be tackled by top politicians.
The deprivation of oil producing communities by the federal government and the international oil firms is another factor that has worsened pipelines vandalisation and crude oil theft.
The militant groups in Niger Delta took up arms against the fatherland when the deprivation of the oil communities assumed unacceptable proportions. Ironically, government settled a handful of trouble makers with strong bargaining power, leaving the deprived communities in abject poverty and zero infrastructure.
The settlement did not address the dearth of potable water, electricity and roads in the affected communities. Even the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) established to address the deprivation of oil producing communities has been pocketed by a handful of vested interests that collect money for huge infrastructure contracts but refuse to execute the projects paid for.
The navy’s misplaced campaign against the makeshift refineries has caused more damage to the environment than the illegal business itself. The primitive refineries are easily replaced as soon as they are taken out by the navy because they cost very little to build.
The illegal refineries would always spring up as long as the supply of crude oil from vandalized pipelines remains uninterrupted. The navy has no way of stopping the flow of crude from vandalized pipelines.
Like the war against corruption, the federal government has lost the struggle against crude oil theft because the mega thieves are more valuable to government than the inconsequential majority toiling in abject poverty.
