Nigeria Seeks Global Efforts to Curb Oil Thieves

President Goodluck Jonathan had last week, Nigeria’s lambasted Western countries whom he accused of buying ‘blood-oil’ stolen from the country’s massive network of crude-oil pipes in the Niger Delta mangrove swamps.

Echoing the president yesterday, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, minister of petroleum resources stated that stolen oil from Nigeria was not usually sold even to the country’s neighbours in West Africa.

“The products from bunkering are not sold in (West Africa), neither are the financial outputs … laundered in West African banks, they are ending up in far flung international fiscal institutions,” said Alinson-Madueke, in a industry conference held in Abuja.

Oil thieves who first emerged on the Nigerian landscape as fighters of justice in the troubled oil region. Several of them later metamorphosed into criminal gangs with several leading military officers posted to safeguard the pipelines, and politicians accused of connivance.

They broke into high-volume oil pipelines and siphon products into waiting vessels where they are sold to waiting buyers usually in international waters. The practice is called ‘illegal bunkering’ in Nigeria.

 Yesterday, the minister stated that President Jonathan was reaching out of global leaders on ways of ending the menace. “Mr. President has begun to reach out with his colleagues around the world. A discussion was held with the Prime Minister of Great Britain on Monday a week ago and they are all coming on board to help sort out this particular menace,” said Alison-Madueke.

Several government and international oil companies’ sources estimates have put the country’s economic losses from the illegal trade to about a fifth of its two million barrels per day output, Anglo-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell, the biggest foreign producer in Nigeria, which recently had a partial court judgment in its favour against indigenous Ogoni rights’ activities in Holland is said to be lobbying the UK government to help end bunkering.