Massive Oil Theft: Calling for greater maritime security

Urgent Call for Enhanced Maritime Security Amidst Rampant Oil Theft

The Nigerian Navy’s “Operation Delta Sanity,” launched for increased maritime surveillance, led to the arrest of over 14 rogue oil vessels in Rivers State alone in the first quarter of this year. This is in addition to 90 badges, 74 suspects, companies and organisations nabbed for the pillaging. The mess highlights the escalation of oil theft and attempts to contain it. With Nigeria’s present economic maelstrom, tightening the noose on marauders in its maritime space has become non-negotiable. The corporate brigands involved, often shamelessly protected by the authorities, need to be unmasked and named.

In Delta State, Tantita Security Service Company intercepted MT Kali in Warri, which necessitated the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa’s visit to the place. Chief of Naval Staff, Emmanuel Ogalla, who disclosed the arrest of the 14 oil ships recently at a meeting with Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State, noted that most of the cases are at various levels of investigation. The inquest should be thorough and speedy, followed by the prosecution of suspects, and those found culpable convicted with stiff penalties.

Perpetual economic crises for Nigeria as an oil-dependent economy, is the net effect of unremitting oil theft. The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Yemi Cardoso, had in December 2023, hinted of the danger ahead, with a projected drop in revenue in 2024, during a joint meeting with the Senate and House of Representatives’ Committees on Banking. His pessimism was premised on OPEC’s new crude oil production quota, oil theft, pipeline vandalism and divestment from the upstream oil sector by some international oil companies.

The confiscated oil vessels, which are of different sizes, include MT Habour Spirit, MT Kali, MT Size Nail, MT Okito, MT Bullarenous, MT Sweet Mary, among others. These ships are used in stealing crude from major tap points of oil pipelines and feeding larger oil tankers stationed on the high seas. Yet, there are countless cases of bigger ships daring our maritime watchdogs and entering our territorial waters, as the super tanker – MT Heroic Idun did in August 2022. It went straight to Akpo Oil Field in a bid to load, but was stopped. It had no documentation or clearance for loading oil from the NNPCL. Such audacity could not have happened without the connivance of highly placed Nigerians. It clearly shows how porous Nigeria’s 315,240 square-kilometre maritime space is. Also, in 2003, MT African Pride was caught with crude, detained but curiously escaped despite being under the Navy’s custody.

This illicit business, worth billions of dollars in value, involves a complex web of local and international collaborators. Nigeria loses about 400,000 barrels of crude daily, or $40 million, according to experts. A total of $4 billion was lost in 2021. The Navy had in 2022 handed over 70 out of 127 vessels arrested for crude theft and illegal bunkering to the EFCC for investigation and prosecution, Ogalla, then as Navy’s Director of Lessons Learnt, told a House of Representatives public hearing. It is obvious now that the seemingly insurmountable nature of this criminality is as a result of the shoddy handling of reported cases.

It was in a bid to stem the heist that the Muhammadu Buhari administration awarded the N48 billion pipelines surveillance contract to Tantita Security Service Company, owned by Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo. President Bola Tinubu has renewed the N4 billion per month contract. In the first quarter of executing the contract under Buhari’s regime, 400 tap points of major oil pipelines were discovered.

The Chief Executive Officer of NNPCL, Mele Kyari, says that over 5,000 kilometres of oil pipelines are not working due to vandalism. He stated in November that “Ten million litres of oil were lost from the volume pumped from Aba to Enugu at a time. The company has not been able to pump oil from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years and cannot connect to Ore. “There is no amount of security measures that had not been taken to curb the crime without success, which to us in NNPC Ltd, is substantially a national calamity,” he noted.

Yes, it is a big shame; but we do not share Kyari’s diffidence or resignation. In this age of high-tech, with sensors or trackers installed on pipelines and the building of a central surveillance system, it is possible to monitor every vessel that enters and exits our territorial waters. Saudi Arabia and other major oil producing nations deploy such measures to secure their oil infrastructure. If these devices had optimally been deployed here, they would have been used to detect the 400 ruptured major pipeline points not known to the NNPC that Tantita uncovered earlier in its assignment.

In climes where public good drives governance, Kyari’s shocking revelations would have provoked angry and awesome reflexes of the executive arm of government. The President as the substantive minister of Petroleum Resources should bite the bullet. We have repeatedly drawn his attention to the $17 billion crude oil theft by some IOCs between 2011 and 2014, which his predecessor documented but failed to act on. Strangely, he too, has been timorous about this!

The perpetrators of this monumental heist have rightly been documented in a report of the UK think-tank, Chatham House, in 2014. The theft is “on an industrial scale,” it stressed, and is engineered by “politicians, military officers, militants, oil industry personnel, oil traders and communities.” The current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nyesom Wike, as governor of Rivers State, corroborated this verdict. Besides, a government agency, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), had stated in an audit report that 160 million barrels of crude oil valued at $13.7 billion, was stolen from the country in four years – from 2009 to 2012, as contained in the shadowy record of just three oil companies it examined.

Therefore, the Federal Government needs to step up to the plate. The crude production figure for March 2024, at below 1.25 million barrels per day, fell short of Nigeria’s OPEC quota of 1.38mbpd, and its stated production plan of 1.5mbpd, subject to verification and approval. The OPEC downward review came amid years of Nigeria not meeting its 1.7mbpd quota, and as a result did not gain from the spike in crude oil prices that reached $100 per barrel not too long ago.

Industry experts say that 50 per cent of Nigeria’s oil revenue is used in defraying the cost of its production. With a daily crude allocation to Afriexim bank for a loan repayment deal of $3.3 billion, and also a similar commitment to Dangote Refinery in respect of the NNPC Limited stake of $20 billion in the company, what then is left to accrue to the public treasury will not save the country from its prevailing forex debacle.

Brazen oil theft by local and international criminals, needs to be urgently staunched to rescue Nigeria from economic turmoil. Nigeria’s leadership must go after those elements Chatham House identified. For too long, a slap on the wrist is all that the few caught get. This is a perverse incentive for them to continue to cut Nigeria’s economic jugular. This is the takeaway from the $15 million plea bargain Nigeria received from the super tanker oil thieves, who were finally let off the hook after Equatorial Guinea that arrested them, handed them over.

Also Read: Nigerian Army, Navy behind oil theft in Niger Delta — Asari Dokubo

Ironically, Nigerian convicts abroad don’t get such indulgence. The country should notch up its economic diplomacy. If stolen diamonds in Sierra Leone and the Congo could be labelled as “blood diamonds,” in the international system, we don’t see why our stolen crude should not be similarly considered.

Within, oil thieves are sometimes convicted and given the option to pay a N3 million fine, as was the case with Messrs Wisdom and Godwin in 2016. This is easily paid, and paves the way for a return to the illegality, sooner than later. This penal regime is overdue for a review. Convicted felons should be made to serve long jail terms, while their vessels and trucks are forfeited to the government. Nigeria must snuff them out of existence so that it can survive.