By John Araka
Ordinarily, most Nigerians should be seriously concerned about the alarm raised by the federal authorities last week that the country lost $3.27 billion to oil theft in 14 months.
But this has not been the case. The reason is that the problem has been with us for several years, with the government paying no more than lip service to its effective and enduring solutions.
The Managing Director of Waltersmith Petroman, Mr. Chineze Nwosu, who represented the Independent Petroleum Producers Group, in a recent shareholders’ engagement seminar said that: “ we have seen crude theft grow from a single-digit percentage to an average of 82 percent in recent months”.
It was, indeed, as bad as 91 percent last December, which reduced to 75 percent in both January and February this year. As he rightly pointed out, this astronomical theft poses an “ existential threat “ to the industry. In fact, not only to the oil industry, but to our economic survival as a nation.
It is inexplicable that the successive top stakeholders, have always failed to contain the criminality, even when it was as low as four percent a few years ago.
They allowed it to fester until it reached this extremely dangerous level. In his presentation at the seminar, the Chief Executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, who is in charge of monitoring the pipeline, Gbenga Komolafe, merely regurgitated, as the causes of the problem, what every enlightened Nigerian has long known.
He said, “ the factors aiding the criminal activities include economic challenges, inadequate security, poor surveillance, poor community engagements , exposed facilities and stakeholders’ compromises “.
To diagnose the causes of a deadly sickness is one thing, to effectively treat it with potent medication, is quite another. He went further to say that the government was determined to end the menace.
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Silva, also echoed the same cliche when he said that “the Federal Government would no longer condone any form of criminality in the nation’s oil and gas facilities”.
All these tough talks are ostensibly to make Nigeria upscale its crude production to enable it benefit from the rising oil prices due to the Russian Ukraine war. But they are, all the same, laughable. Nigerians have for years heard the same threats, over and over again, to criminals from the high authorities.
And that’s where they end. Nothing concrete is usually done. It is no wonder, therefore, that virtually everybody is fed up with too much talk without corresponding actions to achieve the much desired objective of drastically reducing criminality in the country.
Nigeria is now reaping the bitterness of inaction as its revenue is nose diving at a time that other oil producing nations are enjoying an unprecedented boom.
It is quite disheartening that while all oil producing nations are maximizing their output to benefit maximally from the boom, Nigeria is unable to meet its OPEC production quota because of oil theft.
While others are smiling to the banks , Nigeria is grimacing with songs of sorrows and woes. Like every other critical challenge facing our country, corruption is at the root of it all.
The law enforcement agents who are supposed to tackle the problem are easily compromised. They are unable to resist the alluring temptation of collecting millions of naira and dollars, neatly packaged for them, by the stupendously rich criminals, The Trumpet gathered.
In fact, the law enforcers have been often accused of directly participating in, as well as, aiding and abetting the massive plundering of our common patrimony.
So, when the Chief of Defense Staff, General Lucky Irabor said recently that the military would deploy new strategies to significantly reduce oil theft in the country, many people took it with a pinch of salt.
Another major contributory factor, which is sometimes trivialized, is the very high level of graduates’ unemployment. A highly educated person, who has no hope of getting a job, constitutes a grave danger to the society. Is it not said that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop?
Since government is unable to use their knowledge and expertise for the benefit of society, some of them will inevitably be forced to resort to self help by falling back on their well-honed skills.
The Chairman/ Managing Director of ExxonMobil, Richard Laing, at the same seminar, alluded to this when he said that: “ the level of sophistication in terms of tapping into the pipelines, the distributions, efforts required to move hundreds of thousands of barrels a day isn’t some guys coming along it’s organized criminality“.
Read Also: Court adjourns hearing of N10.7 billion Ponzi case till May 27
Certainly, this can only be carried out by graduates, working in collaboration with their senior colleagues who have hands-on experience. Currently, Nigeria has 308 degreeawarding institutions ( 134 polytechnic and 174 universities) . They pour about 600,000 graduates into the already over-saturated labour market every year.
As of now, there are over 25 million unemployed graduates in the country.Some of them have been looking for work for over five years. No luck.
They are,therefore, very frustrated to the point of using any means, either foul or fair, to survive. The country is paying dearly for leadership failure which has resulted in the enunciation of policies that are detrimental to the economic growth of our nation; the most potent weapon against the flourishing of criminality.
To efficiently tackle the devastating challenge of humongous oil theft, the twin hydra-headed problems of overwhelming corruption and unemployment must be seriously and pragmatically addressed by governments at all levels.
