Oil theft in Nigeria has constituted a dangerous twist to the problem in the petroleum up and down stream sectors.
It also represents a more worrisome dimension to the Niger Delta crisis. What can be more disturbing than a situation in which a country which almost wholly depends on oil revenue loses as much as $6 billion (N978 billion) of its annual total income from oil to oil thieves?
The Niger Delta has been in the front-burner of national and international discourse arising from its catalogue of problems, including oil spillage/environmental degradation, as well as gas flaring arising from the activities of unscrupulous multinational oil companies. Till date, the axis is still battling to overcome social and economic deprivation and continuing pockets of restiveness by militants.
Oil theft, as an evolving phase of the crisis is, however, not only considered a grave security and criminal infraction; the economic implications for the country are massive.
The activities of criminals into illegal bunkering, oil refining and pipeline vandalism in the area are said to have reduced daily crude production from an average of 2.5 million barrels under normal circumstances to about 1.8 million barrels.
Due to the accompanying financial loss, the Federal Government has been finding it somewhat difficult to meet its financial obligations these days. In a report by a foreign cable television, Nigerian government officials were quoted as saying that for each month of the first quarter of 2013 alone, the country lost $1.2 billion to oil theft at the rate of $121 per barrel.
From January to July, therefore, oil thieves shortchanged the nation to the tune of $8.4 billion or N1.141 trillion. In other words, the crooks involved in the crime made the country sustain over 34 percent loss in official oil sales proceeds in seven months.
Special Adviser to the President on the Niger Delta, Mr. Kingsley Kuku, at a recent international conference on oil theft in Lagos, disclosed that at the peak of the crime, the country was losing 400, 000 barrels of crude per day to theft and pipeline vandalism.
It was revealed at the conference that the cumulative environmental cost of oil theft and illegal oil bunkering, including estimates on the direct impact on the environment and the cost of restoring aquatic life destroyed as a result of oil spills, was about $1 trillion (N156 trillion).
Kuku said the modus operandi of the thieves include the tapping (destruction) of oil pipelines to siphon crude, the building of unlawful refineries in the jungle and illegal oil bunkering.
From the international arena was also the alert last month by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Paris, France-based autonomous intergovernmental organization established under the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, committed to responding to physical disruptions in the supply of oil, as well as serving as an information source on statistics about the international oil market and other energy sectors, that oil theft in Nigeria had resulted in a dramatic plunge in the general output by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the umbrella global regulatory body guiding oil production, to which Nigeria eminently belongs.
The closure of the Nembe Creek trunk line in Bayelsa State by the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) due to the damage done to it by oil robbers is a good example in this regard.
The shut trunk line reportedly reduced crude production by about 150, 000 barrels per day. We consider these revelations as double tragedy for the nation.
The federal authorities should act decisively to arrest the development, not always crying wolf or hopelessly and helplessly wringing their hands as if they are not in control of state power and all the agencies of coercion responsible for law enforcement and securing the nation.
With the facts and figures made public so far on the subject, it is shocking to the public that containing oil theft in the Niger Delta region has proved an uphill task for the government.
This has helped sustain the growing suspicion that top government functionaries are complicit in the economic sabotage. The embarrassing criminal assault on the nation's coffers has to be stopped forthwith. It is an insult to the nation and Nigerians. This is without prejudice to the fact that oil earnings, no matter how huge, scarcely contribute to improvement in critical infrastructure and the lamentable economic and living condition of the populace.
