By Jesutega Onokpasa
The back and forth over the pipelines and oil facilities surveillance contract awarded to High Chief Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo’s company, Tantita, has been quite typical of our often pedestrian approach to rather very serious issues in this country. It was as if we had all suddenly forgotten how what the President Muhammadu Buhari administration met on ground in the petroleum sector began to unravel when certain interests decided to triumphalistically go after the former militants, how the situation only improved for a while when the administration changed course in the Niger Delta when, upon wiser counsel, it relented, and, how the conditions in the oil industry have now all but completely fallen apart with our currency probably now on the verge of exchanging 1000 naira to 1 dollar!
As it has been said, “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it”. Oil was actually still flowing steadily and being generally accountably lifted, as usual, back in 2015, until we ended up somehow finding ourselves in our present situation where it seems no one can even account for how much we currently produce or are able to sell!
As far as I’m concerned, those who misguided the administration to go after Tompolo back in 2015 were those dislocated by his success in actually securing the pipelines and other petroleum infrastructure and ensuring we got value for our oil up till that point. Once they succeeded in getting him on the run, they not only returned to business as usual but progressively became so emboldened that they now steal just as much of our oil as accrues to our national coffers!
In less than a month, Tompolo and his crew have uncovered the most infernal perfidies in the oil industry. It is vintage Tompolo for you – the simple and humble Niger Deltan, derided as a militant, who nevertheless gets the job done if you are sensible enough to give it to him. What the NNPC, the oil majors, all their security consultants the security agencies and the various military joint task forces could not do, simply refused to do or deliberately decided to undo is now being done by someone that was needlessly and most foolishly hunted down while he was actually getting the job done!
Ours is a country of the most confounding ironies. Only God knows exactly how many trillions of naira we have lost to the diabolical cartels that have been stealing our oil over the years but especially more so since Tompolo was disengaged and it became open season for that cartel from 2015. Yet, some ignoramus’s problem is the value of Tantita’s contract. The entire yearly value of the contract is probably less than 1 percent of what we have been losing on a yearly basis to the oil thieves!
Indeed, the bulk of the sums involved in the oil facilities security deal is ultimately meant for payment of stipends and salaries to huge numbers of indigenous security men and women in thousands of communities across the Niger Delta. When viewed through that prism, the value of the contract is actually small, and, the objections of those who should know better is rather mindboggling to me! My worry is whether through the contract, Tompolo and Tantita are able to present the host communities with a viable incentive and alternative for protecting the oil facilities for our national economy rather than cooperating with the oil thieves or simply looking the other way, feeling there is really nothing at stake for them, after all.
I wonder if those who continue to have an axe to grind with Tantita’s contract have bothered to find out what the major oil companies pay to foreign security contractors – the same contractors under whose watch in tandem with our military and law enforcement agencies, our pipelines were serially breached and untold hundreds of millions of barrels of oil simply spirited away from our shores! All the money hitherto spent by the NNPC, the oil majors and various tiers of government simply disappeared from our national economy with all its unsavory impact on our exchange rate while our oil was being brazenly and most rabidly stolen on top of that!
At least with Tompolo’s Tantita, it is our local communities, our own people, who would end up getting paid to secure our national petroleum infrastructure under its contract. The money will be spent and will remain right here in our country while we get full value for the oil we produce and export abroad!
Indeed, if anything, the contract is actually more than seven years overdue! If the NNPC had not been engaging all manner of inadequate persons and incompetent companies to secure our oil facilities and had simply continued with the system the present administration inherited from the Jonathan government, we wouldn’t have ended up in the quagmire of an economy we are presently constrained to keep our heads above water in.
This is not even really a new contract from the perspective of conceptualization – Tompolo had been doing the same job, and, very well, at that, for many years during which we always generally met our production and export targets. Funny enough, many of those who convinced the government that they had the capacity to secure the facilities and encouraged the administration to go after Tompolo, back in 2015, were just lousy loudmouthed clowns, whom the very same Tompolo, they were traducing, had assisted in delivering on their slots in the then prevailing security arrangements!
For all the criticisms against it, I have no reason not to believe the Buhari administration meant well for our country, right from the start. Unfortunately, certain mistakes were made which have not helped our economic condition at all. To the extent that these mistakes are being corrected, it behoves on all of us to support the one and only government we have in doing so, rather than being petty and coming across as miserably unschooled in the exigencies of a modern economy, especially one such as our own, simply because we might not be personally comfortable with whom a contract was awarded to when that person clearly has capacity and while Nigerians are become hungrier everyday in an imploding economy!
Whatever be the true status of our current oil production, we clearly have a very big problem in that sector and mainstay of our economy. Whatever strategies have been deployed by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, NNPC, since the advent of the Muhammadu Buhari administration in 2015, have also woefully failed to tackle the problem.
Whatever anyone might think of him – whatever weird, embellished and unfounded specter his detractors might seek to invest him with – Tompolo, is actually a remarkably mild tempered, urbane and extremely progressive fellow. He is a man whose grassroots credibility is founded on his penchant for touching the lives of his people in many positive ways. It is astonishing, how much of his personal income he ends up spending on others and deploying to charitable causes, especially by way of economic empowerment and community development across the creeks. Such attitudes and disposition end up making one a force that cannot be ignored amongst the indigenous people in the various localities of significance to the health of our oil industry.
I heard the head of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association, PENGASSAN, commend Tantita’s efforts thus far only to then say the contract should continue for the short term, thus insinuating, it should be terminated at some point in the near future and apparently given back to the same crooked consultants that have landed our country in its present mess! I really don’t understand that kind of logic. I would bet that if and once this contract is terminated, we would be back where we started, if not much worse within a year! This is just the sort of reasoning that keeps dragging us back in this country. If it is a winning team, you don’t change it or, howsoever, tinker with it!
It is, in any case, not even possible for any outsiders or supposed security experts to secure the oil facilities in the Niger Delta or anywhere else, for that matter, without the local people taking ownership of the process. It is also not possible for foreign oil thieves to keep carting away the mainstay of our national economy without the connivance of certain persons in various local communities, cutting across several states. In order to solve the problem, you simply need someone with the local know-how, the native intelligence, the long-term experience, the community networks, and, the regional recognition requisite to checkmating those involved, while correcting dysfunction and dislocation in the system. In short, like it or not, we actually desperately require someone of Tompolo’s ilk to oversee the amelioration of the national emergency we are presently facing. Simply put, the guy can do the job so let him do it!
In short, love him or not, Tompolo has already more than demonstrated the requisite capacity. Funny enough, these things, like all talents, are not man made but given to us from above. Tompolo has over the years shown astonishing capacity for maintaining the peace and assisting the authorities in upholding public order in the Niger Delta and that is something we should be forthright enough to acknowledge, whatever anyone chooses to think of him.
My projection is that those who have been robbing us blind and stealing between a quarter and one half of our oil wealth, on a daily basis, are not going to give up without a fight. Tompolo clearly has the capacity to secure our oil facilities but he does not have the orientation, know-how, experience or even wherewithal to fight the media, public relations, concerted propaganda, high-level lobbying and dirty underground war that is about to be unleashed against him. These animalistically greedy enemies of our country will not give up the insanely lucrative fiefs they’ve carved out of our nation for themselves without one hell of a demonic and no-holds-barred fight. They will be coming for Tompolo and going for broke. It will be in our collective self-interest as a nation to ensure they do not succeed for that is where our bread is buttered.
Our present economic reality is excruciatingly suffocating to much too many of our countrymen and women already. Whatever else we do or choose not to do, we simply cannot afford to let the oil sector remain in its present dire straits neither can we continue to let our currency and legal tender continue in its freefall into a bottomless pit of financial ruin for our country. Tompolo has secured our oil facilities before. Let us let him do it again for our collective good and be on the lookout as the corruption he is presently fighting inevitably decides to fight back with a fury we must commit to confront and defeat for the good of our national economy.
Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Warri.
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