In what is becoming a familiar spectacle across the country, fuel thieves, under the cover of darkness, were said to have swooped on Fagba in Ifako/Ijaye Local Government Area of Lagos State, where they burst open the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation pipeline in an operation that lasted for hours. By the time they were through, they had made away with four 33,000-litre-capacity tankers of fuel. A private security man who challenged them was reportedly overpowered and rendered incommunicado until after the operation.
This is a regular occurrence. Oil theft is seen in light of a broad and deep culture of corruption that has pervaded Nigeria’s political class and its associates in the private sector. According to NNPC, approximately 531 million litres of petrol worth over $251 million was stolen via taps on the System 2B pipeline (from Lagos to Ilorin, Kwara State) between January and September of 2015. The corporation stated that the vandalism of its pipelines across the country rose by a phenomenal spike of 50 per cent in January 2020.
Past occurrences confirm the extent to which Lagos is exposed to pipeline vandalism and its tragic consequences. A pipeline explosion that occurred on January 19 at Ekoro area of Abule-Egba in Lagos claimed five lives, leaving behind a trail of destruction that included 20 injured people, 150 others displaced and five houses and 35 vehicles razed to the ground. The fire was attributed to activities of pipeline vandals. Last December, about six people were also feared dead under similar circumstances. It was however the explosion of December 2006 at Abule Egba area of the state, where more than 200 lives were lost, and the preceding one in May of the same year that made global headlines. With the fatalities numbered in hundreds, these national tragedies have remained locked in people’s memory. The incident of May 2006, which reportedly claimed between 150 and 200 lives, was captured by CNN, which said that many of the incinerated victims were attempting to scoop fuel from breached pipelines.
This brings into question the nature of the arrangement usually put in place to protect sensitive national economic assets. Ordinarily, policing oil facilities should be a national priority, as oil remains the country’s biggest source of revenue and, unquestionably, the top foreign exchange earner. But these facilities, especially the labyrinthine network of pipelines that criss-cross the country, are not diligently policed, exposing them to frequent vandalism and pilfering of their contents.
A report quoting NNPC’s Monthly Financial and Operations Report has it that, in July last year, the pipelines were breached at 228 points, an increase of 112 points over the 116 recorded the previous month. The destruction of facilities and stealing cut across refined and crude products, resulting in a staggering shortfall in national revenue. Chatham House, an independent policy institute based in London, once claimed that Nigerian oil was being stolen “on an industrial scale.” A 2018 report by the Nigeria Natural Resource Charter indicates that a whopping N3.8 trillion was lost to oil theft between 2016 and 2017. For the Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, the country lost crude oil and refined products worth $41.9 billion within a decade. NEITI’s breakdown shows that the nation lost $38.5 billion to crude theft alone, $1.56billion on domestic crude and another $1.8 billion on refined petroleum products between 2009 and 2018.
The Nigerian authorities, especially the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) should be bothered by this serial plundering of public revenue. For a country that has also become so obsessed with borrowing, the need to do so may not have been there if that amount had not been lost to vandals. “While figures from the government put the loss at between 150,000 and 250,000 barrels per day, data from private studies estimate the figure to be between 200,000 and 400,000 bpd. This implies that Nigeria may be losing up to a fifth of its daily crude oil production to oil thieves and pipeline vandals,” NEITI said. Aside from preserving national assets, preventing cheap loss of lives and property is exactly why pipeline protection should be a top priority of any government.
There may be countless cases of vandalised pipelines, arising mainly from lack of proper policing, but many incidents have occurred, not necessarily because of poor security. On the contrary, they have taken place in spite of what was supposed to be adequate security. The stealing of fuel is perpetrated in connivance with security agents. According to the 2013 Chatham House report, politicians, military officers, militants, oil industry personnel, oil traders, communities and organised crime groups are involved in the murky business of oil theft.
The Atlantic, an authoritative global oil centre, says theft, fraud, smuggling, laundering, corruption and hydrocarbon crime, in all its forms, has become a significant threat not only to local and regional prosperity but also to global stability and security. Combating this pervasive criminal activity is made only more difficult by the reality that many of those in a position to curb hydrocarbons crime are the ones benefiting from it. In the Fagba incident, it was reported that those in charge of security were duly warned about the imminence of the illegal operation. Rather than reinforce security, some of the people that were supposed to watch over the place failed to turn up as the reportedly well-connected thieves loaded four tankers of fuel.
It is possible to completely prevent the breaching of pipelines. The trick lies in the deployment of detection devices. NEITI says the government should embrace oil-fingerprinting technology, the comprehensive metering infrastructure of all facilities, and other creative strategies to combat the growing menace of theft of crude oil and refined petroleum products. For the Atlantic, some mitigation efforts — most notably fuel marking and vehicle tracking — have proved extremely useful in efforts to stem illicit activity and regain lost tax revenue. In the United States, devices such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, drones and sensor networks are deployed to detect cases so that they can be quickly fixed. As the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu promised the introduction of an Automated Tracking System in Nigeria. It is still not clear to what extent this has been implemented.
Besides, it is also possible to monitor pipelines with the use of cameras attached to helicopters that would routinely fly over the pipeline routes. The National Assembly should amend the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency Act to prevent the activities of pipeline vandals that leads to explosions and deaths. Ultimately, the law should be deployed sternly so that whoever is caught in this crime of national economic sabotage would not get away with a slap on the wrist, but should be made to face the full weight of the law.
