“The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God” – John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address January 20, 1961.

Leaders must resist playing God as President Olusegun Obasanjo tried to do by dismissing the anger and anguish of impoverished people of Niger Delta in 2001. Crude oil theft, illegal refineries, vandalisation of oil pipelines and violence against foreign oil operators are but natural responses to disdain for ‘distributive justice”, equitable allocation of assets in society or as Aristotle puts it, ‘treating equals equally”.

Conceptually, ‘fuel theft’ in the Niger Delta is a misnomer. For the leading lights and the warring militants of the ‘scorched land’ Niger Delta, whose region has been reduced to by crude oil merchants, it is a euphemism for resource control.

And their reasoning is unassailable. The majority of the people of the region are extremely poor without access to basic necessities of life. Their air is polluted, their rivers poisoned and their land abused. Their youths including “General Loaf” in the words of Pa Edwin Clark, ‘have no education and are unemployable’. Adults can neither fish nor farm. Children with brownish hair are a sad reminder of acute malnutrition. 

And it is not of any relief that they alone carry the burden and hazards of their environment while a few reap its benefits.  While they have no bridges over their rivers, those enjoying the environmental benefits of their land built ‘bridges over land’ in state capitals across the nation including Abeokuta, a city built on the rock and Kano on the edge of the Sahara desert.

 Oil theft in the Niger Delta can therefore be seen as a protest against the tyranny of the state especially when President Obasanjo, a personification of the state, contemptuously breached section 162 (2) of the 1989 constitution which declares that “the principle of derivation shall be constantly reflected in any approved formula as being not less than 13 percent of the revenue accruing to the Federation Account”

Crude oil theft in the Niger Delta is therefore beyond finger pointing as Tony Elumelu, a representative of Nigerian elite who always try to play the ostrich instead of calling a spade by its name tried to do in his interview with Financial Times some two weeks back. It is not enough to demonise the federal government when both the federal and Niger Delta leaders are tarred with the same brush.

For instance, just as Elumelu was pointing fingers, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) was also speaking  of 63 illegal refineries discovered and confiscated in one week in  Bayelsa, Rivers, Abia, Imo and Delta states,  177 incidents of oil theft  recorded between August 3 and 9 by different incident sources and 17 vehicular arrests  made in communities in Mosogar, Oleh, and Amooe in Delta State, Imiringi in Bayelsa State, Korokoro and Akwa Odogwa in Rivers State, and in Akwa Ibom State. The 15 wooden boats conveying stolen crude that were confiscated, in Rivers and Bayelsa states and 19 illegal pipeline connections recovered, during which some underwent repairs across several locations in Bayelsa and River states.

The fact that all the Niger Delta governors, their state assembly lawmakers, LGA chairmen, councillors  and National Assembly legislators live within the above identified crime scenes only validate the thesis that the parasitic bug that feeds on the vegetable lives within the vegetable.

But perhaps to underscore how critical crude oil theft symbolizes symptoms of our crisis of nation-building, requiring urgent political solution, we need to take a journey through memory to remind ourselves where the rain started to beat us.

The Nigerian elite (political, economic, intellectual and the military), the scourge of Nigeria, lured the military into politics. And because the military was ill-equipped and ill-trained to manage a multi-cultural and a heterogeneous society, they soon plunged the country in to a civil war. Desperate to generate revenue to prosecute the war, they embarked on promulgation of decrees including that on-shore and off-shore dichotomy and those that set aside revenue allocation based on derivation, a critical element in our founding fathers’ decision to form a federation of Nigerian ethnic nationalities.

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The confiscation and centralization of resources of the regions that aided their victory during the war was retained by successive military regimes. In the 1979 constitution, Ben Nwabueze and Rotimi Williams whether driven by their ideological beliefs in strong centre or doing the bidding of a military, retained the military era revenue allocation structure.

 The 1999 constitution, often dismissed as Abdulsalami Decree 24, with all its imperfections reluctantly allocated 13% derivation to the oil producing states despite stiff opposition from northern politicians.

 Obasanjo in 1999, perhaps to please the opponents of the 13% derivation who were mainly northern politicians that imposed him on the west and went on to put him power, instead of paying the 13% approved by the constitution, opted to dispatch Bola Ige, his Attorney General and Minister of Justice to seek the interpretation of totally unrelated on-shore and off-shore dichotomy at the Supreme Court in February 2001. Obasanjo’s victory at the apex court on April 5, 2002 reduced the 13% constitutional provision by as much as 7.5%.

People of Niger Delta felt betrayed by their president with  the Ijaw National Congress (INC) declaring Obasanjo’s action as “a declaration of war against the defenceless people of Niger Delta”(Vanguard, April 20, 2002) and the Niger Delta Youth Congress (NDYC)  threatening “to renegotiate their membership or otherwise withdraw from a Nigerian federation which has its laws and constitution significantly skewed in favour of an unnecessarily large, powerful and domineering central government”.(Punch, April 20 2002)

Renewed attack on oil facilities and kidnapping of oil executives soon began. Obasanjo’s side-lined VP Atiku Abubakar, joined forces with James Ibori and other Niger Delta states governors to threaten Obasanjo’s second term ambition.  This threat forced Obasanjo to send a bill to the National Assembly to abrogate the onshore and offshore dichotomy. But it was too late. The militants had realized their potential to wreck Nigerian economy.

Yar’Adua presidency was forced to set up the Amnesty Programme and deploy Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to go and appeal to the conscience of his constituency in the creeks. There were new undertakings including the establishment of a new free trade zone in Ogidigben, Delta State, with world-class petrochemical and fertilizer plants and creation of over five million jobs across the value chain. The Amnesty Programme and Jonathan interaction with his people helped to increase oil production from pre-amnesty level of 700,000 to about 2,500,000 barrels per day.

Despite the Amnesty Programme, the silent war against the federal government continued. As late as 2013, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala,  from her far away World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meeting in New York, admitted to the federal government’s loss of  about 300,000 barrels daily, or $1billion (N155 billion) revenue monthly. According to her  “a great deal of loss in production is also closely linked to illegal bunkering, and oil theft  which  were getting more evasive as the criminals were going beyond the outer pipelines and moving into more sensitive pipes.’ (The Premium Times April 18, 2013).

The 2015 presidential election that pitched President Jonathan, a Niger Delta candidate against Buhari, a Fulani man was turned to an indirect battle for resource control.  Niger Delta politicians led by Nyesom Wike appealed to the sentiments of their people by painting Buhari as an outsider coming to take control of the resources of Niger Delta.  The Niger Delta militants saw Jonathan’s loss as a licence to continue sabotaging the economy of the country. The effect was that crude oil export never moved beyond 50% of what obtained during Jonathan presidency.

Not much has changed under Tinubu presidency. In fact the sabotage of the oil sector and the economy started with Godwin Emefiele, the CBN Governor and Niger Delta indigene who was an aggrieved aspiring APC candidate in the election. Graduates of the Amnesty Programme that received technical professional training abroad are today believed to be fronting for their leaders, their collaborators outside the state and international criminal gangs to resist the tyranny of the state by taking what they believe rightly belong to them.

With over 600,000 barrels of crude oil stolen daily, with over a thousand of unresolved cases of crude oil theft pending in the courts with a hundred new daily discovery by an overwhelmed and poorly paid security personnel that many believe may not be able to refuse inducement, it has become apparent that solution to crude oil theft is not judiciary but politics. The country will be better off by adopting fiscal federalism that allows the oil producing areas retain 50% of generated revenue as was the case in the first republic.

And the cheapest way to go about it according to Chief Olu Falae, “is going back to the Independence Constitution which our leaders negotiated with the British between 1957 and 1959. It was on that basis that the three regions agreed to go to independence as one united country”.