• Increasing oil production daunting as vandals hit 2,426 points in days
• Stakeholders insist security approach failing, seek overhaul
• FG, NNPC traumatising N’Delta, Bassey says

Despite the militarisation of the Niger Delta region and the involvement of private security outfits in the past 18 months by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) to safeguard oil production and reduce crude theft, Nigerian elites, who have been accused of stealing the nation’s crude, appear to be unrelenting and outsmarting the system in an unabated theft.

Most stakeholders yesterday insisted that the many approaches deployed by the Federal Government and continuous spending by the state oil company have failed as they called for an immediate overhaul of the security architecture of the oil sector.

With the development, which is coming in the face of the killing of 16 soldiers and another six police officers in the Niger Delta, stakeholders are accusing the NNPC of deliberately diverting attention from the root cause of theft.

Although the Group Chief Executive Officer of NNPC, Mele Kyari had admitted that Nigerian elites are the brains behind crude oil theft, Niger Delta Statesman, Edwin Clark debunked it and said NNPC and military were behind oil theft.

With oil production remaining way below budget benchmarks for the last three years the NNPC alone is spending an average of N267.98 billion on security, industry players are also concerned that the worsening security crisis across the country meant that the oil facilities alone would not be immune from the crisis.

The Nigerian Army, Navy and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) have a series of operations in the oil-producing areas of the Niger Delta. Daily, they have pictures and videos to show of illegal refineries and pipeline points that are being rescued from breaches and in some cases make arrests but in the real sense, nothing has changed regarding theft and vandalism of oil facilities.

While the NNPC in August 2022, hired a company owned by former militant, Tompolo, to protect oil installations and tackle rampant theft for N48 billion yearly, 2,426 oil theft incidents were reported in the last two months and the first 15 days of March even as the nation’s crude oil production struggles.

From the 30th of December 2023 to 5th of January 2024, NNPC reported 157 breaches on oil assets, the following week, which ended on January 14th, the cases of theft went to 211, it was 214 in the week ending January 19th, it was 176 by January 27th and settled at 241 breaches by 2nd of February.

By February 9th, the theft figure stood at 354, 226 by February 16th, 253 by February 23rd and 263 by the first of March. In the first two weeks of March, the theft cases stood at 335. Monthly, the cases of theft hovers around 1,337.

While several arrests are reported to have been made, Nigeria was able to slightly improve oil production to about 400,000 barrels between the period NNPC started its war against theft and hiring of Tompolo in addition to the Army, Navy, NSCDC and others.

Crude oil production data for Nigeria was 972,394 barrels per day in August 2022 and 937,766 bpd in September when the war against oil theft started.

Nigeria’s oil production in October of 2022 was 1.014 million barrels per day, it went to 1.186 million per day in November. The country recorded 1.35 million barrels per day in December 2022. In January of 2023, the overall crude oil production rate for the country was 1.4 million barrels per day, which means condensate and crude oil. Nigeria recorded a daily crude oil production of 1.47 million barrels per day for February before reducing to 1.2 million barrels per day in March 2023.

With the addition of condensate, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) said oil production rose from 1.245 million bpd in April 2023, to 1.427 million bpd in May the same year. Nigeria’s crude oil production came in at 1.48mbpd in June 2023 (inclusive of 55,088bpd and 176,030bpd of its blended and unblended condensates respectively). The production in July was 1.30 million barrels per day. The oil production was 1.48 million barrels per day for August. September output was 1.5 million barrels per day, it was 1.5 million barrels per day in October, in November 2023, Nigeria’s oil production dropped to 1.2 million barrels per day before rising to 1.418 million barrels per day in December 2023. In January 2024, the production was 1.419 million barrels per day in January this year and the production for February dropped to 1.3 million barrels per day.

The crude oil production benchmark in the 2022 budget was 1.60 million barrels per day. The 2023 budget oil benchmark stood at 1.69 million barrels per day. For 2024, the production benchmark stands at 1.78 million barrels per day. Since the war started, Nigeria just like in the past did not meet its budget benchmarks.

Renowned energy economist, Ademola Henry Adigun said there is an urgent need to develop new strategies to tackle oil theft, which he sees as the driver of insecurity.

Adigun stressed that the current approach is not working, insisting that the private contractor model for providing security should be reviewed for effectiveness.

“Maybe it is time to consider another approach. More community engagement? Seems the Host Community approach is not working as intended,” Adigun said.

Former Chairman, Nigerian Society of Engineers (SPE), Joseph Nwakwue was not in support of the use of private non-state security service providers, describing it as a sad loss of state capacity.

He said the security situation needs to be assessed within the state of security of the entire country, adding that there won’t be a safe area for oil and gas production in a seemingly unsafe country.

Nwakwue said: “The solution is an overhaul of the national security framework and architecture with a focus on boots on the ground, non-kinetic, peacebuilding, community-based approaches.”

Professor of Petroleum Economics and Policy Research, Wunmi Iledare sees the handling of security challenges in the Niger Delta as being quite illusive.

“It is so conjectural as to the expediency of contracting a private security outfit with no experience to manage the challenges effectively.

“Of course, the hope was that the knowledge of the terrain by that security outfit might help, but the drive for oil theft in the Niger Delta seems more driven by greed, wickedness, and criminality than social injustice,” Iledare said.

According to him, it would have been preferable to hire a security institution with experience and technology to combat oil theft challenges.

Iledare noted technology could help with less physical contact with people with a high propensity for criminality, adding that approaching people who masterminded problems to solve the problems with the same method, which created the problems is ill-advised.

Executive Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, Nnimmo Bassey, tagged it as “a big shame” to involve military and military contractors in securing oil facilities.

Bassey believed oil theft in Nigeria is an industrial endeavour and militarisation of the oil fields cannot and would not solve the problem.

“Where is the oil theft happening? Is it along the pipelines or is it at the export terminals? Do we know how much oil comes out of each well? And how much gets to the export terminal? In other words, is our accounting system such that we compare what is loaded in Nigeria and how much is delivered at the importing terminals? These are things that cannot be verified or monitored by the military or by private military contractors. The entire scandal is the failure of the system and specifically of the NNPC. It is their job to monitor and meter the oil fields,” he said.

Bassey said the militarisation of the Niger Delta has been largely counterproductive to the menace under review, noting that the NNPC has succeeded in traumatizing the people in the region through the compounding of the pollution by burning bush refineries and throw diverse acts of highhandedness.
Bassey said: “There is no comparable level of success concerning the curtailing of oil theft. Not at all.”

The political will to stop the attacks continues to be lacking. And this has encouraged or fostered a culture of willful negligence, connivance and complicity among those charged with the responsibility of protecting the assets.

Executive Director, OrderPaper Advocacy Initiative, Oke Epia insisted that the government knows those behind the economic heist but the government is holding back from bringing them to account.

Epia said: “There are reports, including one by a committee that recently investigated crude oil theft in the House of Representatives, that suggest that state actors and the state oil company have looked away from doing the right things to stop the menace. One of them particularly pointed fingers at the NNPCL for failing to use a technology procured, and paid for fully, and tried successfully to alert relevant officials to breaches in pipelines as they occur. Such instantaneous prompts are supposed to be escalated to Government Security Agencies (GSAs) to thwart the theft or provide leads to apprehend suspects,”

He noted that while the technology is not being used remains a question the NNPCL needs to answer, adding that Nigerians could see that farming out security jobs to non-state actors could only produce limited and sometimes undesired outcomes.

According to him, there are other dimensions to the problem, including connivance by global cartels who deal in stolen crude.

Epia noted that a lot could be done to curb theft within the scope and ambit of the federal government and the NNPCL as he described the prevailing situation as shameful.