The frequency of pipeline vandals siphoning fuel has become a source of worry. One of the seven tankers involved in a recent raid, however, caught fire while stealing from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation facility passing through Ayobo, a suburb of Lagos. Bursting oil pipelines to siphon petroleum products has become inexorable with the country’s management of the Downstream and Upstream of the oil sector. The vandals carefully choose the location of the facility to attack. Quite often, the targeted facilities are in bushy areas, or in swampy terrain, thus making it difficult for their acts to be easily noticed and the culprits arrested. But this was not the case with the vandalised Ayobo facility. The spot is in an open terrain, filled with jerrycans, and close to a community with residential duplexes overlooking the scene of the crime.
The ill-fated oil tanker had the capacity to convey 33,000 litres of petrol. Analysts say it takes more than 30 minutes for such a vehicle to load. It, therefore, means that it took hours for the seven tankers to fully load and leave the scene of the rogue operation. This illegal deal might not have been the first there. Why these criminals were not stopped in their tracks by either security personnel or residents of the community beggars belief. As a result, a senior official of the NNPC told this newspaper that security operatives around the zone had been arrested for questioning.
Instructively, the tanker left some trails that could be used to trace the masterminds of this economic sabotage: its detached number plate was left on the vehicle’s dashboard, seen on a Channels Television report, just as there was a Nigerian Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers’ sticker at the vehicle’s passenger’s seat side. Undoubtedly, these materials are of probative value, which security agencies should exploit to get to the root of the matter.
The Atlas Cove-Mosimi oil pipelines that criss-cross Lagos and Ogun states towns and communities are targets for periodic vandalism. The criminality sometimes leads to the death of hundreds of people, especially the poor, in infernos, as they join the vandals to scoop petrol. In Arepo, a suburb of Ogun State, near Lagos State, 100 of such persons were roasted alive in 2015 in one of such firestorms. In the Niger Delta region, similar ghastly incidents are very common with dire environmental consequences for the region.
A few days ago, the Senate Committee on Downstream ordered the NNPC to pay back to the Federal Government treasury the N382.2 million it purportedly used to quench the Kom-Kom pipeline inferno in Rivers State; and tender the receipt of the payment to the committee as evidence of compliance, a directive indicative of suspicion of sleaze.
Since 1999, the FG has been battling with vandals, resulting in billions of dollars contracts being awarded to Niger Delta militants, members of Oodua People’s Congress and some security outfits for pipelines surveillance. The OPC leadership in 2015 had to withdraw their services from the Arepo pipeline, when the government failed to pay for the contract. In August, last year, the government also terminated the contract awarded to a private firm in charge of protecting the Atlas Cove-Mosimi oil pipeline, over an allegation by the Nigerian Navy that the company’s personnel were, indeed, involved in oil theft. It was a clear case of breach of trust. As a result, the responsibility of safeguarding the pipelines fell on the Navy and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps. The then Flag Officer Commanding Western Naval Command, Sylvanus Abbah, while handing over to his successor, Obed Ngalabak, said that since the Navy and the NSCDC took over the protection of the pipelines, no colossal loss had occurred.
Protecting such a national asset should be everybody’s business. Local authorities and residents should be made to appreciate this existential reality as they too bear the horrific consequences of pipeline breaches. But it is incumbent on the security agencies – Navy, NSCDC and Police – to explain how security surveillance broke down in the area to the point that there was never a tip-off from the public while the illicit activities lasted.
Whether crude or refined products, these resources, the country’s economic backbone, moved through a phalanx of pipelines, should be effectively tracked to know when they are stolen or breached, as other oil-producing countries do. The former Minister of the State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, had in February unfolded Computerised Crude Oil and Liquefied Gas Natural tracking devices to ensure that transparency and accountability drove crude production and movement of vessels both onshore and offshore. The deployment of this high-tech device should be vigorous. Chatham House, a United Kingdom think tank, said in 2013 that Nigeria’s oil was being despoiled on an “industrial scale” by a motley crowd of criminals, which involved armed militants, oil industry operators and ironically security personnel.
Shamefully, Nigeria is perhaps the only member of Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries still importing petrol on account of allowing corruption to defang its four refineries. The waywardness costs the treasury $28 billion to import the product annually, Kachikwu said in 2017. Oil pipeline thieves cannot continue to have their way. Maximal penal response from government is missing. This absurdity should be reversed to halt this brazen criminality. Security surveillance on the pipelines should be ramped up to minimise the colossal national loss experienced periodically.
