A member of the Presidential Committee on Defence Strategy, Professor Isaac Olawale Albert, said recently that crude oil theft has continued to boom because retired top military officers are among the masterminds of the heinous crime against the nation. “How can a Colonel or even a Brigadier-General challenge a retired Major-General involved in oil theft? The issue of seniority, which is taken very seriously in the military does not allow that. That is why oil theft is not going down. Those who are supposed to check the act cannot confront those perpetrating the evil deed,” Albert alleged.
However, it is not only the military that Albert holds responsible for what has become a serious organised crime. He believes also that the federal government is not serious about confronting the menace. “The government has set up a number of agencies for the protection of the waterways. But really these organisations are not doing much to ensure the safety of the waterways. If the government had put the money being spent on these agencies into the Nigeria Navy by using the same to equip and fund it, the story would have been different. So, the government should get its act together by properly funding the Navy instead of dissipating energy and resources by setting up agencies that lack the skills to guarantee safe waterways”, Albert said.
While we agree with Albert, we are at pains to add that there is nothing in his revelation that is new. For instance, the Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Mr. Patrick Akpobolokemi, disclosed two years ago that his agency had custody of some vessels seized from the people that were caught stealing Nigerian crude. “There are some big vessels under my custody belonging to organised piracy and crude oil thieves. Very soon, I will release all the big names in the syndicate. Once we do that, people should not come and say it is ethnic cleansing, it is 2015 or all these kinds of stories. That is why we want the media to stand by the truth and ask: ‘did you do the piracy?’” said Akpobolokemi at the time. Yet up till today, Nigerians have not been availed the names of those criminals.
Also testifying before members of the National Conference Committee on Public Finance and Revenue earlier this year, Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha disclosed how when he was governor of Bayelsa State, some oil thieves were allowed to go scot- free because of high level conspiracy between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and some unnamed officials in Abuja. “I had one experience. Tankers were loaded in Bayelsa. I got the information and laid ambush for them and arrested them. About 14 big tankers and they were handed over to the police. They were charged to court and the judge ordered that the product should be tested to be sure they were crude oil. NNPC was invited, they took the sample and after a week the result came out as agro-chemical and before I knew it, all of them had been released”, said Alamieyeseigha.
Several times on this page, we have highlighted the fact that a regime of massive crude oil theft poses a deleterious threat to the nation’s economy. Yet even as we lament this deplorable situation, it is also evident that the problem persists because there is no commitment to deal with the situation by those in authorities. With revelations that the inability to address the challenge may be due to the fact that those involved are powerful people within the society who seem above the law, the federal government can only allow the problem to fester at our collective peril.
