In July 2015, Nigerian President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, fresh from that year’s presidential election victory after three failed successive attempts, visited the United States of America on a thank-you tour. America under Barack Obama and Tony Blair, prime minister of the United Kingdom had conspired with the rest of the West to intimidate the cowardly President Goodluck Jonathan and then impose Buhari on hapless Nigerians. While on that visit, Buhari made two significant but atrocious statements. First, he said that sections of the Nigerian society who rejected him at the poll would be punished. To paraphrase Buhari, he said that nobody should expect him to treat those who gave him 5% of their votes the way he would treat those who gave him 97% of their votes. And he had proceeded to live that vow in the seven years, so far, of his presidency. And second, Buhari told his stunned audience that one million barrels of crude oil were being stolen in Nigeria every day under the presidency of Jonathan. Of course, he lied and had to leave his aides scrambling to find a more reasonable figure of crude oil theft under his predecessor. However, the obvious lie about the quantity of crude oil theft then is not our concern here simply because, as it has turned out in the intervening years, many of the things said by Buhari and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), including their promises, have turned out to be a bouquet of lies.
Buhari had said then that: “The amount involved is mind-boggling. Some former ministers were selling about one million barrels per day.”
At another forum, he mentioned a different figure far lower than one million barrels of stolen crude oil. When asked to confirm Buhari’s claims, his media aide Garba Shehu said “the official position on the quantity of crude oil stolen per day in Nigeria (was) 250,000 barrels.”
When he was pressed for evidence, he had none. Ordinarily, it is said that if a problem is identified, it is half solved. This does not apply to Nigerian rulers, certainly not to Buhari. Crude oil theft has been the lot of Nigeria for decades and since the return to democracy about 22 years ago. It happened under Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, Presidents Umaru Yar’Adua and Jonathan. But under Buhari it has become a monster and a criminal enterprise with tentacles stretching from Nigeria to other parts of Africa, Asia, Middle East and Europe. Under previous administrations, crude oil theft was estimated to be well under 10% but with the advent of Buhari and the APC, 70% of Nigeria’s crude oil is reported stolen on average. I did not make this up. On March 25, a Nigerian newspaper reported that Nigeria lost $3.27 billion worth of crude oil to thieves in the 14 months between January 2021 and February 2022. The Independent Petroleum Producers Group said that 82% of their oil production was stolen in the month of February 2022 alone. Its spokesman, Chikeze Nwosu, who is also the managing director of Waltersmith Petroman, said independent producers were facing existential threats. He claimed that crude theft had skyrocketed from about 4% in the past to as high as 91% in December 2021.
The international oil companies (IOCs) in Nigeria said what is happening in the country’s oil sector beggars belief. They said the situation, which is not new, has rapidly deteriorated from mere crude theft to organized criminality with high levels of sophistication. Chairman/MD of ExxonMobil, Richard Laing, who represented the IOCs at the same Abuja event, said: “As an industry, I know how hard my colleagues work to produce products that we need, and to suffer the level of theft that we have is disheartening. But more importantly, it is a threat to investments, a threat to the health of the industry and wealth of the nation.”
Liang took exception to the use of the word theft to describe what was going on. “The language is very important and I think we use theft rather quickly. I don’t think this is theft, this is organized criminal activity. 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 guy coming along and tapping into a pipeline and taking container crude oil. It’s organized criminality.”
Gbenga Komolafe is the chief executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC). He told stakeholders that criminals have laid siege to Bonny Terminal Network, Forcados Terminal Network and Brass Terminal Network, all major crude oil export terminals. He said the situation in the upstream is nothing short of a threat to the “existence and wellbeing of Nigeria. Recently, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist did the unusual. Tony Elumelu publicly criticized the extant government, virtually saying that this administration was performing below par in the crude oil sector. He said serial failures of successive administrations have left investors in the sector reeling in their losses while oil vandals and criminals are daily taking victory laps.
He queried: “How can we be losing over 95 per cent of oil production to thieves? Look at the Bonny Terminal that should be receiving over 200,000 barrels of crude oil daily, instead it receives less than 3,000, leading the operator, Shell, to declare force majeure. We, Heirs, will produce crude oil and the thieves will steal like 50,000 barrels per day. In my opinion, it is one of the most lethal threats to our country because there is so much money in the hands of people who don’t pay taxes and people you don’t regulate. The country is not safe.”
Former military dictator, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, was reported to have said that, if an insurgency lasted for more than 48 hours, then the government must have a hand in it. The same applies to the decades-old industrial-scale theft of Nigeria’s crude oil. The government knows thieves, that’s if government leaders or their friends are not the thieves. But if it claims it does not know them, then it has failed in one of its cardinal duties: safeguarding life and property of citizens and securing our national assets. And, given Nigeria’s situation, there probably is no greater and more valuable national asset, apart from Nigerians, than crude oil. The oil thieves and how they operate have been in plain sight for years. So, the recent statement by the Federal Government that it will set up a probe panel on the issue is a vexatious distraction. Some international agencies and knowledgeable Nigerians are convinced that Nigeria does not know the quantity of oil it produces daily. They say what is exported does not tell what comes out from the ground because the tallies are usually taken from the terminal and not the well head.
“The oil fields are not sufficiently metered in a way that permits independent verification,” Nnimmo Bassey, an environmental activist, once told Africa Check. “The state of affairs makes it impossible to have a good guesstimate of the nation’s crude reserves.
Blood Oil in the Niger Delta was the title of a report on oil theft in Nigeria. The decade-old report exposed how the thieves operate. They may have gone nuclear since then, but the report still provides an insight. It said one of the methods employed by the thieves was to tap either the pipeline or the well head. “The process involves… attaching a hose to siphon off the oil. From there, the oil is placed on small barges and taken out to sea, where it is loaded onto large ships lurking (supposedly) out of sight of authorities.”
Local youths do the dirty work, but international syndicates from Eastern Europe, Russia, Australia, Lebanon, the Netherlands and France all play roles in financing, transporting and laundering the proceeds. Another approach, according to the report, is for companies to pump more oil than their licences allow. And this involves oil company staff, ranking Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation officers and top government officials who award the oil lifting contracts.
The simple truth is that Nigeria does not know the quantity of oil extracted from its belly daily and so is not in a position to say how much of it exactly is being stolen.