A damning report by StrategyPage, a leading resource on armed forces affairs worldwide said that Nigeria is seen by international crime experts as the center for organized crime in Africa because the culture of corruption makes it easier for major criminal enterprises to survive in the country.
According to StrategyPage, even without all the oil wealth to steal, the Moslem north in Nigeria also suffered from this culture of corruption, which it claimed , is the main reason for the appearance of Boko Haram.
“While these Islamic radicals blame the corruption on Western influences, the north was corrupt long before European colonialists showed up two centuries ago.
The corruption is worse now because there’s more to steal and the participation of so many senior government and commercial officials makes it easier to launder money and get it out of the country” the report added.
StrategyPage said that these are bad times for Nigeria, pointing at a number of issues bedeviling the polity.
It said that “ the continuing Boko Haram violence in the north and growing proof of massive oil revenue loss ($6 billion a year, at least) from theft down south has led to a the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) splintering into factions accusing each other of corruption and incompetence.
Well publicized and energetic efforts to halt oil theft in the Niger Delta have failed, despite very visible military efforts to find oil thieves out in the swamps, arrest them, and seize their boats and crude oil refineries” the report said
According to StrategyPage, the problem, as always, is the corruption adding “Who guards the guards? Boats seized by the troops are sometimes spotted back in use by other gangs of oil thieves.”
“When arrested, oil thieves complain that their efforts are nothing compared to what the politicians and oil companies steal.
There’s a certain amount of truth to that but the oil thieves who tap into pipelines waste 70 percent of the oil that comes out of those punctures.
These oil thieves live in the area and now their robberies are the major cause of oil pollution. The tribes demand compensation for the ecological damage from the oil companies who blame the government for not being able to control the pipeline attacks and the resulting leaks” StrategyPage added.
Oil theft related arrests in the Niger Delta usually involve shutting down thieves who do not have a politician sponsor (who takes a cut of the profits for providing protection).
The foreign oil companies that run the drilling and pipeline operations are threatening to leave if something is not done about the oil theft gangs.
The stealing has become so extensive that daily production fell from 2.3 million barrels a day to about 2 million this year. This is despite efforts to increase production. The government hoped to increase production to 3.7 million barrels a day.
The previous peak was 2.6 million barrels a day 7 years ago (before the Niger Rebels got going and oil theft became a much larger problem). It proved impossible to get back to 2.6 million but production might get back to 2.4 million barrels a day. That will be difficult because oil theft is now all the rage in the Niger Delta and the popular enthusiasm for it is not slowing down.
In addition to the oil thieves, investigators have documented decades of theft from oil profits once they are in government bank accounts. The thefts from pipelines and government bank accounts has amounted to over $10 billion a year in the last decade. The annual GDP of Nigeria is $238 billion, for a population of 165 million ($1,440 per capita).
Oil accounts for about 14 percent of GDP and unemployment is currently about 25 percent. These revelations document what a lot a lot of Nigerians had known for a long time. The theft is so pervasive (40 percent of refined petroleum products are stolen) that the activity is hard to miss.
Eliminating the stealing has been difficult because most politicians and political parties are financed by stolen oil money.
The well-funded thieves are organized and determined to hang on to their wealth. Judges and police can be bought and many oil thieves have already been prosecuted and escaped via bribes. But there is progress.
The oil thieves are under attack, some do lose, but the war will go on for years and there will be a lot of obstacles.