Those Oil Pipeline Explosions Source: Africa News Service Publication date: 2000-08-17

Lagos - The horrific pictures from the first explosion caused by scavengers around a punctured oil pipeline at Jesse were damning enough. The more recent ones at Egborode-Oviri Court, and another some 28km away, near Sapele, all in Delta State, were, by far, a greater reproach to the conscience of the country.

The queasiness induced by the sight of so many incinerated remains of the human body was traumatic, no doubt. But beyond this, there is the dire need to query the reasons why the nation leans towards such mindless waste-of farmlands, the environment, and of a peoples' way of life. Over the period since independence, governments in our land long ceased to care for the welfare of the people. What passes for national consciousness has fallen into the grips of solipsism so nominal, that a morally repugnant leadership, long since accountable only to itself, now recognises no reason to explain itself. This leadership, long ago, concluded that victims of these pipeline accidents are vandals, and to this extent, it is implied that their fiery comeuppance ought not to be rued. But the technology required to vandalise these fuel-bearing pipelines bears witness against this interpretation.

Without fail, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) buries its six-inch thick pipes six feet underground. It is not difficult to imagine a determined vandal, mattock and digging tool in hand, burrowing this deep to secure access to the pipes. However, much more than the artifices of a chisel are required in order to drill through the pipes thus uncovered. Indeed, the recent fire at Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria's Cawthorne channel field in Rivers State prescribes a different provenance for these tragedies. Preliminary investigations of this incident point an accusing finger in the direction of well-organised criminal gangs responsible for breaching the pipelines and, in the process, extracting huge quantities of oil for sale in the thriving black market. The fact of 103 pipeline vandalisations in the first half of this year alone is sufficient proxy for the size of the returns accruing from this line of business.

Apparently, the toddlers, women and the aged who thereafter make the headlines only seek to connect with this value-chain by mining the gaping sores which the sleeker operatives leave in their wake.

For these people, it comes as scant consolation, that the NNPC has instituted a probe to determine the nature and extent of the complicity of its personnel in these several violations of pipelines in the South of the country. However, for inhabitants of Oko-Oba in Ifako-Ijaiye Local Government Area of Lagos State, the NNPC would do well to avert looming carnage by promptly replacing damaged sections of its network of pipelines in these places. Beyond these short- lived expedients though, several other questions arise. Charges that in a number of places, entire sections of pipeline due for maintenance or replacement at least eight years ago still are in commission, establish the measure of NNPC's guilt as regards the flowering of oil pipeline explosions in the country.

The bigger question though relates to the reasons why people with a long- standing appreciation of the combustibility of petroleum and petroleum-based products would indulge in such high-risk activities for peanuts. This question is the more pertinent in the light of the extremes of self-involvement, which characterises the national elite. The unhappy answer is that for this people, the value of their life has been so discounted, it is worth so much less than a bucket-full of sand-contaminated fuel. In this sense, the selfishness of the elite, and the many acts of self-immolation by the people are but different frameworks for interrogating one and the same phenomenon. The abysmal state of poverty in which the people exist is the currency with which the nation purchases the outrageous wealth which our leaders daily flaunt. And it is this poverty which daily erodes the meaning which ought to be part of the people's definition of themselves. Requiring the NNPC to find effective ways of protecting its pipelines from the ravages of those who would steal from it would no doubt protect some people from a rather miserable fate. Nevertheless, all over the country, poverty will continue to find other ways of taking its toll on the people of this country.

Publication Date: August 24, 2000.

(Copyright Tempo.)

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Distributed via Africa News Online by Africa News Service.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 18, 2000