Nigeria’s battle against oil theft may be a long-drawn one, and may even never be won, as those involved have a thriving market in Togo, its nautical neighbouring country.
The base, known as ‘Togo Triangle’, is a floating business hub on the high seas where stolen crude from Nigeria valued at trillions of naira is loaded on rouge ships owned by foreigners.
Investigations by TheNiche showed that the perpetrators include the nationals of Australia, Hong Kong, Russia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, China, Ukraine and Thailand.
The business is not without the connivance of both Nigerian security agents as well as supervising petroleum agencies, including the Nigeria National Petrol Corporation (NNPC) and Petroleum Pipeline Marketing Company (PPMC).
Those who operate in the Togo axis disclosed that big ships swarm the triangle where smaller boats from Nigeria load them with stolen oil.
There are people who serve as fee-charging middlemen who refer to themselves as facilitators.
“A vessel may have authorisation to lift 60,000 barrels of crude but someone at the terminal decides to feed it with 140,000 barrels. That is not a mistake you know. The vessel will later transfer the surplus to another tanker.
“You and I are not to blame. We are only looking for something to eat,” one of the facilitators told TheNiche in Togo.
Perhaps the easiest way of stealing crude from Nigeria is through an official process called crude oil swap.
Between 200,000 and 220,000 barrels are taken out of the country a day under swap arrangements with different countries. However, there is no proof of any swap-refining going on in the designated countries.
Togo is making so much money just as its tourism industry is expanding in leaps and bounds through oil thieves who come to the country under the guise of being tourists.