Intriguing editorial today in The Guardian. It says 680,000 barrels of Nigerian crude oil are stolen every day.
The editorial highlights a crucial problem with law enforcment in Nigeria -- the fact that the people in charge of enforcing our laws are too often "allied" to the people breaking the law.
It is no secret that most of the Niger-Delta militias began as paid political thugs in the employ of senior politicians, shifted to oil bunkering when the politicians were not forthcoming with payments, and have since discovered bunkering to be more lucrative than party-political thuggery and election rigging. It is unlikely the connections between politicians and militia-men were ever severed.
In like fashion, serving and retired generals have been accused of involvement "oil bunkering", a connection that became difficult to deny when the bunkering ship MT African Pride was allowed to sail away from custody. The MT African Pride incident was so blatant, the authorities were forced to try and convict two admirals. And it is not just the fat cats at the top of the food chain; mid- and lower-ranking officers have been known to get a slice of the action too, like these officers who charge fees for protection to citizens who scooped crude oil from a vandalized pipeline.
Of course many Nigerians, in government, the civil service, and the wider society, are very keen on enforcing the rule of law. And soldiers and policemen have lost their lives in the fight against bunkerers, militia-men, armed robbers and extremists of any colour .... but the efforts of these men and women are wasted in a situation where senior leadership figures play both sides of the fence, and where their own mid- to lower-ranked colleagues exploit the gaps in the system to milk a little extra cash.
We the people of Nigeria are the losers. It is not enough that public money officially disappears or is wasted after entering the public treasury, but with the rise of bunkering we the citizens are losing the money even before it gets to the Treasury.
At a time when the state and federal governments are about to borrow $11 billion in total to finance their deficits, our crude oil exports have dropped dramatically, partly because of the global economic downturn but mostly because of theft and violence, including this recent attack that cut production by 300,000 barrels a day. According to the report, The Guardian's sources in the Central Bank of Nigeria made availabe a CBN report on our oil exports in January, 2009 which revealed Nigeria was only able to export 1.45 million barrels a day, from production of 1.92 mbd (down 300,000 from 2.2 mpd due to violence).
Between violence and theft, the deficit is worse than it need be.
Of course, I am not saying that all would be well if we stopped theft and violence ... but we should be focusing on the reforms we need, rather than adding more problems to the onese we already have.
And it is simply impossible to enforce laws in a situation where the chief law enforcers are also the chief law breakers. In the near-future I am going to do a blog post on the failure of the Nuhu Ribadu-led Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, a sort of rebuttal to his army of admirers .... and one major factor in his failure is that he was in fact part of a corrupt, law-breaking federal government, a singular fact that was always going to render him ineffective even if he was truly committed to the task.
The system is not working. We need to change the system.
No comments:
Post a Comment