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.

Adekunle and nine others in the three-storey building were killed and scores injured. Despite being marked for demolition, and sealed four times by state government officials, the building remained inhabited. 

Its developer, who has yet to be publicly named, is said to be on the run after the incident. They circumvented restrictions and allowed tenants back into the building, charging them exorbitantly for the privilege. Every time there was an order to seal the building, it would be reopened.

A resident of the area, Lanre Shobaloju, said he suspected corruption was involved. “There is a chance that government officials were paid kickbacks,” he said. “The tragedy would have been averted if the tenants had been evacuated.”

Government officials at the city planning agency declined to comment on allegations of corruption. But a worrying pattern has emerged and is difficult to ignore — there’s a long list of similar disasters in major Nigerian cities over the past few years. And it’s growing.

Local media have reported on at least 74 buildings that have collapsed in the past six years. More than 240 people have been killed and at least 260 seriously injured. Each incident displaces scores of households, given that so many involved multi-storey residential buildings in urban areas. 

In April, Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, a visiting scientist at Brookings Institute in the United States, published a study examining 167 building collapses in Lagos between 2000 and last year. 

He found at least 6 000 households had been displaced as a result. Lagos accounts for nearly four in every 10 building collapses in Nigeria, according to 2019 data from the Building Collapse Prevention Guild, an advocacy group of building professionals.

In the last 20 years, Nigeria’s economy and population have grown rapidly, creating a demand for housing. Local governments have failed to match this demand with government housing or adequate oversight of the real estate developers who have stepped in to fill the gap. 

Developers appear to get away with constructing substandard buildings, and rake in rental income from people desperate for accommodation, with authorities either not aware or looking the other way.

A year ago, on 1 November, a luxury flat block in the Ikoyi area of the city came down, killing 44 people, including the developer. It sparked a wave of outrage across the country, yet led to precisely zero prosecutions. Ten more buildings have collapsed since then — most of them in Lagos. 

Building expert Emmanuel Oluwa-seyi says both the government and real estate developers are to blame. He said the buildings fell down because of “bad design, overloading of the bearing capacities; failure to obtain approved drawings; the use of defective materials; poor workmanship and illegal conversion of existing structures”. He added: “The regulation of standards and the prosecution of defaulters is abysmal.”

Kehinde Osinaike, general manager of the official agency that issues physical planning permits in Lagos, said the state was prepared to “wield the big stick” on errant developers who put the lives of people at risk for selfish gains, saying in the past officials had tried “civility”, to no avail.

“We are going to instruct our legal team to proceed with arresting these unrepentant developers,” he said.

A bold commitment but one that echoes the official, but empty, promises that have followed every building collapse of the past decade.  

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here