Calling for greater maritime security

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.