Subterfuge on the high seas

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The sea has long fascinated humanity as a big slice of life. A store of value, it has spawned battles across the ages. In his chapter titled Floating ideas: Memory and the sea in medieval romances, Jamie Mckinstry writes (See Robertson et al {eds} The Sea in the Literary Imagination: Global Perspectives): “The sea is full of literal and symbolic paradoxes. It can bring hope and life, but also can create fear and destruction; it is a realm of possibility and potential, but equally a place of limitation and interruption.” American writer Christopher Paolini, in his fantasy fiction Eragon, also pays homage to the sea in this manner: “The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles.”

Like the title of the renowned literary critic Segun Adekoya’s epochal inaugural, that is a homage to paradox; the sea is life, like in Wordsworth’s The world is too much with us, but it is also death, like Ahab, the lead character in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a gripping seafaring novel, discovers to his eternal damnation. Ahab aims to hunt down a white whale that had grievously injured him during a previous voyage, and not even the realization that his 40-year seafaring has been a waste deters him. But when he finally encounters the whale, the hemp line of his harpoon lodges around his neck, plunging him tragically into the depths of the sea. Many are actually senseless on the high seas, as we shall see presently.

Here at home, you probably remember Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, an engagement with the Niger Delta condition, or Tony Afejuku’s A Spring of Sweets. In that intensely lyrical, seductive selection, Afejuku writes of “the oilmen” who polluted “the deep emerald waters of the rivers” of the Niger Delta and ensured that “the faiences of our shore and forest/are shorn of divine beauty and blessings.” As developments on the sea this week indicate, the oil men are still at their dirty game, flinging their impunity in our faces.

The story is that Tantita Security Services Ltd, an outfit owned by ex-Niger Delta militant Tompolo, intercepted an oil-thieving vessel, the MT Tura II, which is owned by a Nigerian registered company, Holab Maritime Services Limited. Knowing the bounds of his contract, Tompolo handed it over to the authorities. And then the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) promptly announced that it had destroyed the vessel, which it said was heading to Cameroun. According to its spokesman, Garba Muhammad, the crude oil cargo onboard was illegally sourced from an offshore well jacket in Ondo State, and further investigations revealed that the vessel had been operating in stealth mode for the last 12 years. The destruction of the vessel, Muhammad enthused, was to meant serve as a deterrent to oil thieves. He added: “The illegal trade of stolen crude oil not only inflicts significant economic losses on Nigeria and legitimate stakeholders in the oil industry, but also perpetuates a cycle of corruption, environmental devastation, and social instability. NNPC Ltd. assures Nigerians that we will sustain the momentum in the war against crude oil theft until it is brought to a halt..”

We return to the sea, the site of great mystery. Vessels are arrested but we hear no talk of dollars, the currency of the sea waves. This particular vessel had once been arrested, but it “disappeared in mysterious circumstances.” Hmmm. The sea and its wily ways!

According to Senator Francis Fadahunsi , a retired deputy comptroller general , the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) could generate N6 trillion annual revenue for the country if the security agencies ended the massive smuggling currently going on in the country. Happily, however, the lawmaker did not shy away from the crux of the matter, which is that some international oil companies and highly influential Nigerians are actively involved in massive crude oil theft in the Niger Delta. Fadahunsi, like Tompolo, the ex-militant too eager to deliver on his contract, is a patriot, but the fact that Nigeria’s khaki men write their own distinctive poems at sea is, per T.E Eliot, not worth forgetting. Afrobeats king, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, saw the hemorrhage in the 70s, and gave vent to his angst in the unforgettable Army Arrangement. Nigeria, he warned, was in a government of cronyism (Na padi padi government we dey), and if the Head of State got on his nerves, he was going to unmask the government’s book of scandals! (I go open book for am). Vintage Fela: “Add am together, give me the answer: Army Arrangement!!”

Asari Dokubo, another ex-militant and current warlord, went to the very seat of power and told the world of the khaki men’s poems of theft, subterfuge and false patriotism, but his profile as a pampered non-state actor overshadowed his claims. But the chairman of the Bayelsa Traditional Rulers Council, King Bubaraye Dakole, would have none of the miasma of maritime fraud. Speaking during an interview with Arise News this week, he spewed hot lava. Hear him: “The vehicle was burnt because it was cheaper to burn it than to rein in the oil thief that is behind it all. Usually what Nigeria has done for decades is to parade the young, helpless, uneducated youth from the Niger Delta as the typical thief….But the real thief is someone who has a yacht and a golf course; someone who cannot sleep a night in the Niger Delta because of mosquitoes and insecurity. He’s someone who has land in Banana Island, in London, in Abuja, in Frankfurt, in New York City.”

And that brings us to the bonfires on the sea, about which Nigerians have become quite curious. Pray, just what does anyone achieve by burning intercepted vessels? Why not turn them over to the state and even use them to hunt down other oil thieves? If, for any reason, the vessels are for destruction, then why not just dismantle them and use the carcass for other things? Are there no mechanics (auto technicians) in the military? Why burn oil on the waters, causing ecological damage and polluting the environment? Why burn oil that belongs to the government and people of Nigeria just because someone stole it? What kind of logic causes you to destroy your property just because someone stole it? The answer is subterfuge.

The oil thieves are only having themselves a ball. They parade and jail lowlifes, then retreat into clubs parading whores who provide pleasure as they drink themselves to stupor, and straight into diabetes. That is the way of the sea.

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