BY JACOB BRIGHT
Yet again, the menace of oil theft, known as “bunkering”, in the Niger Delta area has come to the fore once again after the explosion of an illegal refinery in Imo State which claimed scores of lives.
The illegal refinery exploded penultimate Friday around 11pm. Like similar incidents before it, failure of leadership was glaring as the authorities seem to be bereft of ideas to curtail the practice they frequently said was a cause of economic sabotage and air pollution.
The oil rich Niger Delta is home to Nigeria’s oil reserves. In spite of the enormous wealth buried underneath the grounds there, poverty reached an alarming rate in most of the communities there, and some youths took up “bunkering” as a means of securing the necessities of life.
These youths have taken their “dealings” a notch higher. Most stolen crude is no longer refined in the Niger Delta. Instead, they are sold to “middle men” who own barges, and who in turn take the crude to larger tanks in ships coasting on the vast ocean, ready to be sold to the highest bidder from any part of the world.
Because of this and other reasons, youths in these oil communities are neck-deep in their illegal activities, and defend their nefarious acts by saying they don’t have any other means to survive in Nigeria’s harsh economic environment. So, when the “refinery” in Abaezi forest in Ohaji-Egbema Local Government Area of Imo state, exploded, youths were the major casualties.
The National Emergency Management Agency which is saddled with the responsibility of managing disasters in Nigeria, announced about 110 fatalities.
According to NEMA, most of those who perished in the inferno were burnt beyond recognition. However, eyewitnesses narrated incidents where villagers removed the charred remains of relatives before men of the agency got to the scene, which pointed to a higher casualty figure.
The Point recalls that in October 2021, an illegal refinery site, usually called “kpo fire” among the Ijaws of the Niger Delta, exploded in the Rumuekpe community in the Emohua Local Government Area of Rivers State. The site burst into flames which killed scores of people (mostly its operators), and injured many others.
When Hope Uzodinma, the governor of Imo State, addressed reporters, he said, “It is an economic sabotage to our country, where people steal our crude oil, refine illegally and, even without the guarantee of the quality of such products, sell to the people. And some people suffer engine failure and all sorts of problems with their vehicles as a result of these illegal activities. So, people must be law-abiding, must refrain from taking into any activity that will amount to economic sabotage, criminality and all that.”
Uzodinma added that his address didn’t mean he was not “empathetic to the loss of lives associated with the incident”.
According to him, “it was unfortunate”, and he advised those whom he said were still “in that practice to desist from such acts.”
One of the high profile government officials at Abaezi forest was the Imo State Commissioner for Petroleum Resources, Goodluck Apiah, who described bunkering as a “suicidal business.”
The commissioner informed newsmen that the owner of the illegal refinery, Okenze Onyenwaoke, had been declared wanted by the police.
In a statement released by Garba Shehu, President Muhammadu Buhari described the incident as “a catastrophe and national disaster.”
He also promised that the long arms of the law would catch up with anyone culpable.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest exporter of crude oil. It is estimated that the nation loses an average of 200,000 b/d of oil to bunkering and vandalisation of oil pipelines, which accounts for about a tenth of her total oil production.
Because of a paucity of oil to refine and other industrial reasons, most refineries in Nigeria are “dormant.”
For instance, the Port Harcourt Refining Company and Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company have a joint installed capacity to refine 335,000 b/d worth of crude. It is this inability to meet the nation’s refining needs that these illegal refineries hidden in the creeks and forests in the Niger Delta try to exploit.
Because the operators of the illegal refineries were either tapping or vandalising pipelines, the Nigerian government was reported to be losing an estimated $4 billion yearly due to these oil theft activities and it doesn’t stop there. Soot (an air pollutant) has continued to wreak havoc on that environment.
A senior lawyer from the Niger Delta, Honesty Eguridu, told The Point he agreed that failure on the part of leadership contributed to the explosions in the illegal refineries.
According to him, Nigerians are now used to disasters, and it no longer means anything to them. He added that when disasters happen, the government, with their usual rhetoric, would sweep them under the carpet.
“Somebody said that Nigeria is already used to disasters, and human life means nothing because of failure of leadership. Recently, it was said that there was a massacre in Plateau State, and everyone just went about their businesses like nothing happened. No statements from the government, no day of national mourning declared. After that, we heard about Imo. Yes, Garba Shehu made a statement on behalf of Buhari, that the people responsible for the explosion should be apprehended, but that is all we will hear about it, and I bet you, we will not hear any other thing about it again.”
Eguridu said that failure of leadership was an understatement. In his assessment, leadership in Nigeria was in stages, which he listed to include those at the community level, local government level, and these two, according to him, have broken down irretrievably because of poverty and money politics in Nigeria, respectively. He further disclosed that the leaders at the community levels were no longer respected and didn’t have much say.
“If you look carefully, it would not be surprising that one or two policemen were among the casualties (burnt to death). All these show that laws are not operating in Nigeria or enforced. The laws are there in the law books, but there is no enforcement
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On the leadership at the local government level, the notary public said some of those at these levels were “the very players in this illegality going on.”
At the state government level, he said “they cannot tell us that they are not aware of such illegal activities in their states.”
Explaining, he said, “Activities that have that kind of multitude of persons (should not go unnoticed by the state governments). If you listened to some of the respondents from that community, they put the figure (deaths) at over 600 people. Just one community accounted for over 200 deaths, and they said the communities involved were more than three or four. All of them (communities) meet there. The place is like a market.”
Eguridu was of the opinion that there was no way various governments, the police or even the DPO or Area Commander in those communities wouldn’t have been aware of what was happening in their domain.
He said security agents must have been complicit and were likely among those burnt to death.
“If you look carefully, it would not be surprising that one or two policemen were among the casualties (burnt to death). All these show that laws are not operating in Nigeria or enforced. The laws are there in the law books, but there is no enforcement.
“When I say “enforcement”, I don’t put it at the doorsteps of the police alone, because even the police are victims of bad leadership. How much is their salary?” he added.
On bunkering being a “suicidal business” and Niger Delta youths undeterred in spite of the grave dangers linked with bunkering, he said, “You are going too far. Recently, in Lagos, a tanker fell, and people were scooping fuel from it. Another one, a groundnut oil tanker fell, and people scooped the oil from a drainage, and they intend to use it (groundnut oil) for cooking, or maybe, to sell it for others to use for cooking.
“If you notice, anytime you hear of fuel tankers falling, people will rush down to scoop fuel. It is not only in the Niger Delta, because people (everywhere in Nigeria) are dying of hunger. So, at the end of the day, you cannot deter people from going into anything that is risky.
Eguridu also likened the desperation of Nigerians to survive to the biblical story of the four lepers at the entrance of the gate of Samaria in the land of Israel, who, because of the “lockdown” in Israel in those days with the attendant famine owing to the siege of the Syrian army against Israel, dared to venture into enemy territory to see whether they could get some food to eat. Eguridu said the lepers were fortunate to meet an empty Syrian camp, and took some of their food back to Israel.
“They (lepers) went and luckily for them, they were able to discover the bounties. So, today too, people will tell you that if they sit down doing nothing, they will die. It’s like Nigerians in Ukraine. They said they were not going back home and that despite the war, they were still better than people back home. Those students said it was better they died in Ukraine than to go back home and die the worst kinds of death from poverty, kidnapping, Boko Haram,” he said.
Speaking further, he said Nigeria was a failed state and noted that passengers in the ill-fated Abuja-Kaduna bound train were still in captivity 28 days after they were kidnapped. He wondered how Nigerian leaders could be campaigning for elections when all was not well. Eguridu said the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, whose ministry owned the responsibility to run the trains, was “busy traveling from place to place, campaigning and jostling to be president.”
On the way forward for Nigeria, the Delta state-born lawyer said he was in support of using legislation to regulate the “refineries”.
He said the vice president of Nigeria also mooted that idea when he visited the Niger Delta.
His words, “When Osinbajo visited Niger Delta during the time Buhari went for one of his medical vacations, and when he (Osinbajo) was the acting president, that was one of the recommendations he made. The Vice President said the modular refineries should be licensed and legalised because he saw “gain” in it.”
Eguridu observed that if the people who ran the illegal refineries were brought into the mainstream economy through legislation, they would have the capacity to build better refineries and “do it (refining crude oil) better.”
Eguridu also said that approving state police would help to curtail illegal oil refining. He said with the current structure of the Nigeria Police Force, the buck always stopped at the President’s desk. He noted that Governors shied away from certain responsibilities, claiming they are not in charge of the police and the police don’t obey them.
“It is only when they want to use the police for illegal activities that they have control over them, but when it comes to them doing the right thing, they will tell you that police are not under them,” he said.
Another measure, according to Eguridu, was resource control. He was of the view that if each state managed their resources, none of the ugly incidents would have happened.
“If they were controlling their resources, the Imo State Government would never allow anybody to tamper with it like that. They feel it is for the Federal Government, and not their business,” he said.
In Eguridu’s opinion, state governments usually sit around waiting for monthly allocations from the central government after the sale of crude oil, and because resource control means payment of taxes to the government at the centre, the states would have been doing everything in their power to “reduce the stealing, the illegal refineries all over the place.”
