OPINION: Rogue rulers, oil thieves, and ghosts of Lekki

BELOW are excerpts from a press release issued by presidential spokesman, Malam Garba Shehu published on July 22, 2015. The statement spoke in part to the vexed subject of crude oil in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region prior to the accession to power more than seven years ago by the All Progressives Congress [APC]. About the time this release was published, the newly minted President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari was in the United States of America savouring his victory at the polls after serial and personally painful failures in three preceding consecutive tries. Defeating an incumbent President in Nigeria or anywhere for that matter on the continent of Africa was no mean feat. So Buhari and the APC were eminently entitled to their bragging rights.

But in the euphoria of what was expected to be a new dawn, many Nigerians failed to observe the inconsistencies in the stories of the new regime of what they met on the ground and what they planned to do to set the country on a new course. And one of such areas was the state of the health of the crude oil sector which is the live wire of the country. As at then and to an extent up till today, crude oil exports account for about 80 percent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings. So it was no surprise that the shenanigans in that sector was of utmost concern to Gen. Buhari who had been petroleum resources minister 30 years earlier under a military dispensation. And the follow up by Shehu through a statement which excerpts we reproduce here. ”President Muhammadu Buhari, Tuesday, in the United States vowed that his administration would trace the accounts of individuals who stashed away ill-gotten oil money, freeze and recover the loot and prosecute the culprits”. He said that ”corruption in Nigeria has virtually developed into a culture where honest people are abused”.

”According to him, ‘250,000 barrels per day of Nigerian crude are being stolen and people sell and put the money into individual accounts’, adding that the United States and other developed countries ‘are helping us to trace such accounts now. The amount involved are mind-boggling. Some ministers [in the ousted administration] were selling about one million barrels per day. I assure you that we will trace and repatriate such money and use the documents to prosecute them. A lot of damage has been done to the integrity of Nigeria with individuals and institutions already compromised”. As at then and even up till date, no statement by the henchmen of this regime would be considered complete until the ”16 years” of the preceding government was brought into it. So Buhari through Shehu continued: ”While agreeing that the ‘economy is in an extremely bad shape’ following 16 years of bad government by the Peoples Democratic Party [PDP] which ran down the oil refineries and had the treasury in their pockets,” he said the new APC regime would combat insecurity, revive the economy and fight corruption. Note that in the same statement, the volume of stolen crude was on the one hand 250,000 barrels per day and on the other hand one million barrels per day.

In 2015, the records of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] showed that Nigeria was pumping 1.8 million barrels of oil per day. Without justifying theft, the alleged loss of between 250,000- 1,000,000 barrels did not hurt the country that much. Fast forward to 2022, the report about town is that oil thieves steal nothing less than 80 percent of the country’s oil production. Add to the misery the fact that Nigeria now barely produced one million barrels of oil per day. The reality is that Nigeria is not contending with crude oil theft, it is faced with a life-threatening organised crime involving the leaders of the same regime that bemoaned seven years ago the brigandage in that sector, with the connivance of other domestic and international rogues. A key player in the sector who is the head of one of the International oil Companies [IoC’s] in Nigeria once said that what was happening in the Niger Delta was an ”organised crime by a syndicate” and that it would be difficult to absolve the government of complicity. In other situations, a problem identified and defined is half solved. In the case of Buhari and the APC, a problem identified and defined is a problem compounded and made worse.

Presently we are being daily assailed and assaulted with stories of the ‘discovery’, akin to Mungo Park and the River Niger, of ”illegal pipelines” stretching for kilometres which were used to siphon crude oil in the creeks and swamps of the Delta. The business, ”uncovered” by a private pipeline surveillance firm which was recently awarded a multibillion Naira contract, had been on for nine years. With a television camera in tow, the head of the NNPC Limited, Mele Kyari, was taken round and around the ”illegal pipelines” to see with his own eyes. Of course, you would expect that he did not go to the tourists site alone. An industry player told me that an active crude oil pipeline is potentially worse than hellfire. He said the fire from any breached point would incinerate any and everything hundreds of metres away from any point of sabotage.

READ ALSO: Nigerian govt confirms arrests of 210 suspected oil thieves in Niger Delta

He said for a pipeline to be tapped, it must be ”shut-in” and the information on the period of the shut-in communicated to the cabal. In a REAL country, you will expect the oil minister to apologise to Nigerians and then resign. If he were to do so he would lose nothing since, in our case, the petroleum resources minister and the president of the republic are one and the same person. So the persons who should apologise and then resign are the minister of state for petroleum resources, Timipre Sylva and the head of the NNPC which though privatised is still, by all intents and purposes, a government parastatal. But to expect that is to expect too much. If there are no consequences for Buhari who compounded a bad situation he met in the oil industry, why should we expect the lesser fries to carry the can.

Meanwhile the ghosts of our children who were killed in cold blood while waving Nigeria’s national flag and protesting police brutality and serial bad governance which has mortgaged their future have taken permanent residency in the Lekki Toll Gate Plaza in Lagos state. If your conscience has not been seared and if you have a sense of recent history, there is no way you can avoid the eerie feeling whenever you drive through that plaza of blood. One of Nigeria’s music artists wrote a song with haunting lyrics to commemorate the massacre of our children at that spot on October 20, 2020. It will be two years to that BLACK DAY in two days time. But the ghosts of our murdered children, killed by the state that was supposed to nurture and protect them from harm, have refused to go away. And the ghosts took human shape and form in the days leading to million man rallies on October 1, 2022 in support of the presidential candidate of the Labour Party [LP] in the 2023 elections, Mr. Peter Obi, and his running mate, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed by the group which calls itself OBIdients. Some persons had gone to court seeking to stop the rally or at least to get the court to prohibit the prospective rally attendants from converging at the blood-stained Lekki plaza. Part of the prayers of the plaintiffs was that any rally or convergence there would lead to their being tormented by the ghosts of Lekki. The court sided with the complainants in a ruling that established that the ghosts of our innocent children who were killed in that place will haunt us for a long time. It is instructive that the Lekki Toll Plaza, a goldmine for the concennaires and the Lagos state government and a point of traffic and vehicular gridlock had been laid bare and fallow for two years running. The present state of the toll plaza speaks to the evil and wickedness of October 20, 2020. To think that it was the year that the children who survived the Covid-19 pandemic were killed while waving the flag and singing patriotic and freedom songs. It seems we just can’t stop adding to the stains on our national flag.

AUTHOR:UGO ONUOHA

---

Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now