After spending four days as media embed with the Nigerian Navy in anti-crude oil theft operations in the Niger Delta, PRECIOUS IGBONWELUNDU reports that connivance and greed of oil companies, fear or complicity by host communities, accessibility of the terrains as well as corruption and delays in the criminal justice system are fueling the menace.

Metal tanks of about 10,000- litre capacity each with long iron pipes, hoses and large pits filled with products littered vast expanse of lands with choking stench of petrol that leaves the uninitiated feeling drowsy and nauseous.

There were also tents with white hankerchiefs on shrubs signifying peace truce or red clothes with charms, makeshift beds, mosquito nets, rain boots, flip-flops, kitchen utensils in some of these sites mostly located in islands with no access roads, bridges or telecommunication networks.

Underground pipes connecting crude oil reservoirs suspected to have been siphoned from well heads along the Trans-Forcados by the criminals who ran other pipes to various tanks and dugout pits, such that diesel, kerosene and the waste products go into different channels from their heat ovens through hoses and metal pipes were observed.

In some of these metal pipes and hoses traced to crude oil well  heads located between five to 15kms away and abandoned by both international and national oil firms for not being economically viable, the liquid gold was visibly gushing out into dug out pits, barges and other storage facilities emplaced by the thieves.

The above were common sights at Market Square by Cawthorne Channel, Alakiri, Azuzama, Lobia, Forupa, Oyeregbene, Sangakubu, Ekeni, Ezetu, Sagbama, Fununu, Amassoma, Minibei, Ayama, Oyoma, Mbiama, Ahoda, Azikoro, Otuoeke, Onimubu, In Jones creeks Rivers, Bayelsa and Delta states; havens for vicious crude oil thieves who illegally cook  Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) and Kerosene, rob the country of billions of naira in crude earnings as well as destroy agricultural lands and aquatic life with reckless abandon.

It is not news that Nigeria’s oil sector has seen turbo-thievery in recent years with seeming helplessness from the government on the best way to contain the menace. Oil thieves have become increasingly daring, sophisticated and prosperous. The financial power of the oil thieves has reinforced their sophistication and encouraged them to morph from pussy cats into lions such that they even parade gunboats and General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG) which they used to engage security forces that dare to dislodge them.

Enroute Azuzuama community, a journey of over five hours on gunboat from the Ministry of Transportation jetty, Yenagoa, this reporter who was embedded in the Nigerian Navy (NN) anti-crude oil theft (COT) operation codenamed Dakatar Da Barawo, a Hausa phrase for stop the thief, and spent 16 hours on the river to and fro Azuzuama, observed militants fleeing a cooking site in a gunboat, apparently, after receiving information that the naval operatives were on their trail.

Armed men in one of the five naval boats on the mission were directed to pursue the fleeing criminals but they had to withdraw from the chase to protect the journalists on board after the militants fled deeper into the creeks.

At the illegal refining site, two wooden boats containing crude oil abandoned by the fleeing vandals were set ablaze by the operatives to prevent the criminals from utilising them when they returned, just as pumping of crude into a pit was ongoing.

Thick black oil on the surface of the river, dead trees with oil soaked roots and even thick dark clouds around the cooking areas were visible and indicated that the operators of these illegal businesses have a ready and thriving market.

Despite the 2011 Ogoniland report by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), which revealed unprecedented concentration of benzene, a carcinogen and hydrocarbons occasioned by oil spillages that has polluted air and water; oil theft and illegal refineries still persists in the Niger Delta.

In some instances, UNEP’s study showed benzene concentrate in outdoor air were 900 times higher than the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) benchmark, while the contamination of drinking and ground water posed serious threat to human health, caused distortion of the ecosystem and would take up to three decades to clear.

Although the federal government had approved the establishment of modula refineries as a way to checkmate crude oil theft, which according to the Nigerian Natural Resource Charter (NNRC) robbed the country of N3.8trillion between 2016 and 2017, the syndicates involved in the crime have continued.

 Statistics

In its September 12, 2022 report titled “The Anatomy of Crude Oil Theft in Nigeria: Understanding the Graft, Impact and Implications”, Proshare Research made a comparison between the actual gross earnings from oil and the estimated value of stolen oil, where it observed that N1.03trn, up to 54% of actual gross oil revenue earned in the first half of 2021, was lost to crude oil thieves.

“This marks a notable deterioration compared to previous years. In 2017 with an average crude oil price of US$54.3/barrel, Nigeria lost an estimated N1.56trn, an equivalent of 38.2% of actual gross oil revenue of N1.89trn except for 2020, when average crude oil prices tanked to US$42/barrel, lost revenue on account of crude oil theft has continued to increase”.

Months ago, the Group Managing Director, Oando Plc, Adewale Tinubu, while speaking at the Nigerian Oil and Gas Conference in Abuja, said the country loses 20 per cent of her daily crude production and 20,000 barrels of oil per day to thieves and pipeline vandals, lamenting that between March and May, the country recorded 43 per cent decline in oil production.

Also, the Chief Executive of NNPC Limited, Melee Kyari, raised the alarm that the country lost $1.5 billion to oil thieves between January and March this year.

Shell Petroleum Company (SPDC) in a 2019 report stated that crude oil theft on the SPDC Joint Venture (JV) pipeline network resulted in a loss of around 11,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) the previous year, which is more than the approximate 9,000 bbl/d in 2017.

The multinational firm blamed illegal refining and third party interference for 90% of the spills of more than 100kgs of SPDC-JV pipelines last year. The report revealed that over 1,160 illegal theft points have been removed by SPDC alone since 2012.

“Oil spills due to crude oil theft and sabotage of facilities (referred to as third party interference), as well as illegal refining, cause the most environmental damage from oil and gas operations in the Niger Delta.

“The number of sabotage-related spills of more than 100kgs in volume in 2018 increased to 111 compared to 62 in 2017. The sharp increase in 2018 can (in part) be explained by an increase in theft activities in a pre-election year; availability of our production facilities following repair of a major export line in 2017; price of crude oil and refined products that is seen as an opportunity for more illegal refining.

Read Also: War against oil theft: Tompolo’s gunboats storm Niger Delta creeks

“This demonstrates that continued air and ground surveillance and action by government security forces to prevent crude oil theft and illegal refining remain necessary,” it stated.

Why crude oil theft persists

Checks by our correspondent showed that combating crude oil theft and associated crimes have proven impossible because of the connivance of corrupt staff of both national and international oil companies, who largely benefit from the abnormality.

These people buy the products from the criminals at outrageously cheap prices only to resell at official rates, and in the case of PMS, still file false claims for subsidy to the government for products not imported. In Bayelsa State for instance, it was learnt that filling stations ran out of products when operatives of NNS SOROH started dislodging the criminals and deactivating tankers, barges found carrying illegally refined products.

Moreover, these oil companies deliberately abandon well heads they consider dry and refuse to seal them only for the vandals to knock off the valves and connect their pipes such that whenever pumping activities are going on, they would have unrestricted access to crude oil for their use.

They also allow crude oil theft because it provides an enabling environment for corrupt officials of the NNPC in particular, to lift more quantity than they declare, export through back deals to make money for themselves, since no other agency physically monitors the lifting of crude oil.

An example of the above is the case of a vessel which arrived Nigerian waters on August 7, 2022, and was accosted by a naval ship before it fled to Equatorial Guinea where it was arrested on August 10, 2022, only to produce a loading approval on August 11, which showed it was to commence loading on August 17.

 

This implies that the vessel, which, showed was hired at about $85,000 USD per day, arrived Nigerian waters 10 days before its supposed loading date, thus accumulating approximately $850,000 USD as chatter fee for the voyage.

Even at a premium of $2 per barrel for three million barrels, the chatter fee defies economic logic, and a pointer that the vessel would have lifted crude illegally without the proceeds being remitted to the federal government had it not been accosted.

Aside the oil companies, host communities have also been found to connive with the thieves either as a result of fear of being harmed or out of sheer nonchalance and greed. Because these cooking sites are mostly located in the middle of nowhere, these criminals ordinarily wouldn’t know security forces were coming after them unless they were alerted by locals posing ad fishermen, onlookers, dredgers or wood cutters several kilometres away.

Operation Dakatar Da Barawo

With the successes recorded in the navy’s fight against illegal bunkering on the high seas in 2015 through the Choke-Point Management and Control Regime, which saw the deployment of Naval Security Stations (NSS) or Houseboats anchored permanently at strategic/problematic areas on the waterways to monitor and intercept vessels suspected of illegal activities, the criminals, who were trapped in their enclaves, resorted to opening one-stop shops in their camps, where their clients come to with drums, kegs and specially constructed waterproof boats to purchase crude oil, diesel, kerosene or bitumen in commercial quantities.

Faced with this new challenge and the alarming losses incurred at the beginning of the year, the Chief of Naval Staff (CNS) Vice Admiral Awwal Gambo on April 1 flagged off Operation Dakatar Da Barawo, with a mandate to dominate the waterways through aggressive and intelligence-driven patrols aimed at curbing the menace and preventing the movement of stolen oil products to other countries through the sea.

Launching the operation at Onne, Rivers State, Gambo said reports of massive revenue losses necessitated the multi-pronged efforts to curb the excesses of the criminals.

He emphasised that the Navy, under his watch, was committed to eradicating acts of criminality in the country’s maritime space and the Gulf of Guinea (GoG).

“It would also be dedicated to monitoring pipelines; block identified strategic estuaries to prevent conveyance of stolen crude oil from inshore to sea and to maintain credible presence along the coastline of areas prone to crude oil theft,” Gambo said.

Successes

Within the six months of the operation, 95 suspects have been arrested; a barge, one tugboat, 132 wooden and six fibre boats seized; two trucks, 18 pumping machines, five outboard engines, two generators, one AK47 rifle, one dane gun, three AK47 magazines and 92 rounds of 7.62mm live ammunitions recovered in Rivers State alone by operatives of NNS PATHFINDER.

Also, the base deactivated 215 illegal cooking camps, seized 23.5 million litres of AGO, 18 million litres of crude oil and 6.2 million litres of DPK within the period, just as four suspected sea robbers/pirates’ camps were also dislodged.

According to the Commander, NNS PATHFINDER, Commodore Suleiman Ibrahim, this volume was split between crude stolen and production deferment (shut-ins) due to legitimate fear of losing substantial volumes in transit.

He said the navy has established, sustained its dominance and have been able to achieve deterrence to some extent but cannot single-handedly curb the menace unless other stakeholders played their roles effectively.

Ibrahim emphasised the need for oil companies to ensure that well heads no longer useful to them were permanently shut in order to deny the criminals access to products. He decried situations whereby the navy would discover these well heads, inform the oil firms but no action would be taken several months after to seal them off.

“The solution to the problems of crude oil theft, pipeline vandalism and illegal refinery require the collaboration of all stakeholders. We cannot completely eradicate the problem without the traditional rulers, community leaders, state and local governments, the media and the oil companies themselves. The navy is doing its part and we will continue to do so.

“The Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Awwal Zubairu Gambo has given us all the support within his ability for us to do this job, but the truth is that it takes a lot of resources to execute swam buggy operations.

“We spend a minimum of N500,000 to deploy a swam buggy to an illegal cooking site each day just for the equipments. Multiply that by the number of days we have been doing this since April 1, and same goes to other operational bases.

“It is pertinent to state that the Swamp Buggy operation is still ongoing in order to degrade the infrastructure used by the illegal bunkerers. Currently, the base has deployed two Swamp Buggies, two tug boats, two barges and gunboats to Alakiri for Anti-COT operations. These efforts are all geared towards the attainment of the objectives of Operation DAKATAR DA BARAWO,” he said.

In its area of operation (AOO), NNS DELTA also deactivated 132 illegal sites, 75 wooden boats, 14 speed boats, 12 outboard engines, 78 pumping machines, nine generators and 100 jerricans between April and September 27, said the Commander, Commodore Abdulhamid Baba-Inna.

The Commander who conducted reporters round Jones Creek, said they also destroyed 631,992 storage facilities, 19,311,000 litres of crude oil, 8,844,890 litres of AGO and 372,650 litres of PMS, 346,075 litres of DPK and 265 drums.

He said the base impounded 10 tankers/vehicles, arrested five suspects, discovered 681 dug out pits and 1008 ovens within the period under review. “The well head is active because they usually tap crude oil from there using pipes or hoses which are put into wooden boats then taken to dug out pits where they are discharged and then taken to the cooking pots.

“The location of this well head has been reported to the NPDC and other oil companies in the area. We are expecting that they will come and do the needful. From this point, usually once they see us coming they take to their heels.

“In previous operations, arrests were made and suspects handed over to the appropriate agency for prosecution and necessary actions. Areas where arrests were made are Egwa 1, Egwa 2, Opunami, Sagara creek, Ekemu, Jones Creek and a host of others.

“Anytime we come in we talk to the community. But, of course, we have the good and bad people everywhere. So, maybe the bad people have overwhelmed the good ones.

“To carry out this operation requires a lot of logistics. Looking at where we came from, it took us an hour plus to get here, and if you are to move in a swamp buggy to this place, it will be at least six to eight hours. This is similar to every other site where you have these illegal refineries,” he said.

In Bayelsa State, a two-million litre capacity barge loaded with illegally cooked AGO was intercepted last week and samples sent to the laboratory for confirmation. As soon as the result showed it was illegally refined, the barge was deactivated in line with presidential directive.

Commander, NNS SOROH, Commodore Patrick Atakpa, while addressing reporters at Azuzuama said the base ensured that buyers of these products were caught in order to break the chain, adding that over 20 trucks have been impounded and crushed.

He said the site was destroyed three weeks ago through manual labour because it was impossible to deploy the swamp buggy based on the terrain, lamenting that the criminals were already back to the scene..

“We deactivated this camp three weeks ago. The Navy will continue to do its part but other agencies have their own role to play. The message we really want them to get is that when we deactivate a place, they should go and seal the wells.

The way out

For former President, Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria (MOMAN), Tunji Oyebanji, it was possible that rogue staff of International Oil Companies (IOCs) were involved in such criminal activities and not the companies themselves.

He said the solution to crude oil theft was application of technology in the production, storage and loading chain that would enable tracking.

Oyebanji said: “IOCS, from my experience, operate under strict corporate governance codes. I doubt if they would indulge in such practices unless their staff who would be operating on their own. But no IOC would engage in such as official policy or operations.

“Corruption is pervasive and the staff of any institution is not insulated. Where it is discovered, IOCs will generally take severe disciplinary action.

“The solution is to apply technology so that all production, storage and loading are tracked. Just like you use fingerprint access to open dome doors, you need to find technology that will track movement of crude throughout the value chain.