After each incident, fingers are pointed, factors like bad roads and corruption are listed and investigations are promised. (STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
Paul Chette was returning home to his family one night in late April when a tanker carrying 33,000 litres of petrol collided with a truck along the East-West Road in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and exploded.
From where the factory worker stood, everything in the inferno’s path seemed instantly reduced to ash. Watching the scene, the 51-year-old man could not hold back tears.
The explosion had consumed five people, destroyed more than 120 vehicles and torched everything within a 500m radius.
Chette was far enough away to emerge unscathed.
The April inferno was not Chette’s first experience of fuel tanker fires. In May 2022, a petrol tanker explosion on the same road claimed the lives of his younger brother, Maxwell, and those of several others.
“My brother’s wife and children are still too hurt to accept the reality of his demise,” said Chette.
The two incidents form part of a long list of death and destruction on Nigerian roads in recent times.
Last August, the Foundation for Investigative Journalism found that more than 800 people have been killed since 2018 in more than 200 incidents of petrol-laden tankers catching fire across Nigeria.
On 4 May, just over a week after the Port Harcourt, Rivers State, incident Chette witnessed, another petrol tanker fire killed seven people along the Warri-Sapele Road in Delta State.
Nineteen days after that, one exploded along the Mowe-Ibafo axis of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.
After each incident, fingers are pointed, factors like bad roads and corruption are listed and investigations are promised. Little is said about why the tankers are on the roads at all in a country with extensive oil pipelines.
The answer to that is unmitigated vandalism on the pipelines.
Nigeria has a 5,001km oil pipeline network running from 22 petroleum storage depots and four refineries across the country. The refineries, different and older than Aliko Dangote’s new one in Lagos, are not functional and so don’t use the attached pipelines. But no one would consider repurposing them for transporting imported petroleum products because of the fear of vandalism.
According to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, from 2017 to 2021, nearly 209 million barrels of crude oil were stolen in 7,143 recorded cases of vandalism on pipelines.
The losses from those incidents amount to $12.74 billion.
The government’s own estimate is even more staggering: $20 billion lost annually
to oil thieves who breach poorly secured pipelines.
There have been more than 9,000 pipeline breaches this year alone, according to the national oil company. “As we remove one illegal connection, another one comes up,” its chief executive, Mele Kyari, told the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
He said the company had closed 6,409 illegal refineries in the Niger Delta region alone and detached 4,846 illegal pipes connected to its pipelines but estimated that nearly 700 other illegal connection points were still syphoning.
A $50 million oil pipeline surveillance deal with a company owned by a former militant leader, Government Ekpemupolo, popularly known as Tompolo, has not ended the vandalism.
Nor has the fact that the crime attracts 21-years-to-life imprisonment if caught but only a fraction of the more than 5,000 oil thieves arrested since 2020 were prosecuted.
Given the risk of pipeline transport, oil marketers are playing it safe by trucking petrol on the road. Safe, until it’s not.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy at thecontinent.org.