"Of course it's sad. But these things happen all the time. We are used to it" - Ihezue Obi, a newspaper vendor

Looking at the photographs was a test of human endurance. Charred human figures, burnt totally beyond recognition. Flesh had been turned into pure charcoal. The sea into which the victims jumped when the explosion occurred and tragedy ensued had been turned into a graveyard, with bodies and skulls littering the beach. Many more are said to be beneath the sea; hopefully those bodies will be washed ashore in a matter of days and the body count of casualties will continue. Helpless rescue workers had counted about 200 bodies. One of them, relying on the evidence of his eyes, conjectured that the casualties could be up to 500. As the victims could not be identified, a mass grave was hurriedly dug by the sea, and the bodies, now mere things that had been rescued, were dumped into that hole. Residents of the adjoining villages, who had lost relations, and witnessed the tragedy could only weep and wail. They refused to talk to the rescue officials and the press. They were too shocked to translate their grief into sentences.

On the sea, five boats had been found, also burnt out. Wads of N500 notes littered the site. By the beach, rescue officials collected over 500 jerry cans, in addition to pails, pans and all sorts of equipment which had been used to drill the pipeline, and puncture it in about eight places. The eight drilling points were still visible, they had become eight gateways to hell. The Deputy Governor of Lagos State, the state Commissioner of Police, and the zonal Assistant Inspector General of Police, visited the scene of the tragedy; they could only shake their heads in consternation. NNPC officials alleged that they had always warned persons not to tamper with petroleum pipelines, but it is clear that Nigerians would never listen.

Once more they preached to the living not to commit suicide by vandalising NNPC pipelines, after assuring the public that the incident would not affect the supply of refined petroleum to South West Nigeria.... Welcome to Ilado village, between Snake Island and Atlas Cove in the Amuwo Odofin and Oriade Local Government Areas of Lagos state, the latest stage for the enactment of a familiar but all too sad Nigerian story. Yesterday, the newspapers treated the incident as news and splashed the charred bodies on their pages, with at least two newspapers devoting their front pages to it. This is just as well. Spectacles of man as disposable waste no longer shocks Nigerians. Death as a self-imposed accident is a recurrent feature of Nigerian life. It is appropriate to confront the public with the extent of desperation and its consequences.

The tragedy at Ilado is the latest in a series of similar incidents that have occurred in different parts of Nigeria in the last eight years. In each case, persons, organised groups and communities took advantage of the refined fuel distribution network which criss-crosses Nigerian coastal communities to vandalise the pipelines, or to scoop fuel from ruptured locations. Whereas they do so successfully in some instances, when they succeed nobody ever hears about the vandalisation, but on more than five occasions, this act of collective suicide has resulted in gory deaths. In October 1998, in Jesse, Delta state, over 1, 000 persons were burnt beyond recognition when a spark at the site of a pipeline vandalisation led to an explosion that wiped out villages and left a permanent scar.

Since then close to 1,000 persons have also been lost under similar circumstances in parts of the country, instructively in Southern Nigeria. Every incident confronts us with a basic question: why would anyone willingly court death? Every pipeline tragedy is man-made. Having ruptured the pipelines, or chanced on a burst pipe, Nigerians of all grades would carry containers of a thousand descriptions to scoop fuel illegally. They would struggle for the finished petroleum product, the black gold. At the site of the theft they would haggle with customers and set up a market of death in the presence of a volatile material. Housewives even go to this market with babies strapped to their backs. And when tragedy results, there is no escape. Each tragedy does not teach any lessons. The next time a pipeline is available for scavenging, the people simply do not bother.

No incident illustrates this desperation more than the experience at Oke Odo, a section of Lagos, a month ago. Residents in the area had descended on a pipeline that had been prised open by corrosive erosion and human intrusion. They collected the fuel that gushed out and the site became an emergency fuel station. Cab drivers and transporters besieged the place and bought cheap, black market fuel. When the landlords association in the area alerted the police and the NNPC, the merchants of death who had taken over chased away the police and NNPC officials with stones and cudgels. Luckily, there was no spark of fire. Otherwise, the tragedy would have been colossal, and that would have been right in the heart of the city of Lagos

On Friday, more persons died in the pipeline tragedy in Ilado in a matter of hours than was the case in Iraq on the same day. And yet Iraq is a war zone. What is it that has happened to Nigerians that they are so willing and ready to wage war against themselves and die in the process? I have been told that poverty explains the problem. But it does not provide a complete explanation. Poor people do not fight their poverty by endangering the very life that they seek to improve. A wise poor man should know that his condition can only improve if he remains alive. How many buckets of fuel can anyone scoop to escape the poverty trap? I find a better explanation in the collapse of values in our society. This is so bad in the sense that nothing seems to matter anymore to Nigerians, not even life itself. There is a culture of greed in the land that is everywhere evident.

The culture of hardwork is dead. People are looking for the easy way out. They want to reap where they did not sow. They will do anything for money, not necessarily because they are poor or ignorant, but simply because the Nigerian of the last two decades has been socialised to believe that the best way to make progress in this society is to try all things possible. If a pipeline were to burst in the middle of Ahmadu Bello way in Victoria Island, I wouldn't be surprised if company executives throw away their ties, roll up their skirts and join the mob of fuel scavengers! We may reason in the words of Ghassan Hage that "nothing - there is nothing worth dying for". Hage is referring to the idea of death as sacrifice, death as ideology, death as the expression of ultimate love for something that is defined, death as romance. But the pattern of deaths that we find in Nigeria these days compels us to assume that Nigerians are becoming indifferent to life.

Those who scoop fuel and die in the process are not like the suicide bombers of international fable; they are not soldiers defending any sovereignty; they are not ethnic militias challenging the politics of Nigerian nationhood; they are people who are prepared to die for nothing. They are so frustrated with life, they are ready to risk it for the price of death. Self-murder on a mass scale in the process of mere self-gratification is a reflection of the psyche of society itself. That kind of death is condemnable. It is stupid. And yet this is what we see daily in today's Nigeria. On the highway, persons drive their vehicles, without any regard for speed limits. When a Nigerian driver takes a vehicle, his ambition is to race till the end of the speedometer.

He knows that the vehicle could somersault or cause accidents, but he hardly cares. Electricity cables, including high tension wires are vandalised by persons who no longer care about death. If the thieves are electrocuted in the process, that would not deter future vandals. There are Nigerians today who know that there is something called HIV/AIDS and yet like Jacob Zuma, the stupid Deputy President of the ANC (in South Africa), they continue to engage in unprotected sex. The people who died at Ilado were thieves, and they left evidence of their crime. Their deaths do not fill Nigerians with pathos. There is almost a total indifference after the initial expression of horror. This was no plane accident; it is a gamble that went awry; a gamble whose cost was imaginable and foreseeable, and completely avoidable.

But again, moral conclusions do not resolve the dilemma: what must a man die for? An idea? The nation? A woman? Religion? Love? A jerry can of fuel? Or nothing. To check pipeline vandalisation, the NNPC and other government departments must embark on a sustained and rigorous public enlightenment campaign. They must draw the people's attention to the dangers involved in tampering with high pressure pipelines carrying toxic and inflammable material. Nigerians have to be educated about the need to love themselves. Life and hope are aspects of love, not self-murder. The same campaign must be extended to all forms of dangerous living: reckless driving, drug trafficking and abuse, indiscriminate sex, criminal conduct and negligence.

Many Nigerians know that life is important, but they need to be so reminded so that when their interest in life is tested by the prospect of easy gratification, they would not throw both life and the gratification away under the guise of taking a risk. The media must also promote this campaign. As for the NNPC, it must take practical steps to upgrade, safeguard and monitor its pipelines. Access to the pipelines is too easy. Many of the pipelines have been washed to the surface due to years of erosion. They are old, weak and vulnerable in many places, having been in use since crude oil was discovered 50 years ago. The technology of pipeline use may also have to be reconsidered and the routes re-mapped.

The illegal trade in stolen fuel at Ilado went on for many days before the tragedy that occurred at 3. 00 am on Friday, May 12. The police were aware of it but did nothing. Initial reports indicated that policemen received bribe from the fuel thieves and looked the other way. At Oke-Odo last month, they were chased away with stones and they gladly went away! Of what use are Nigeria's security agencies if they cannot always enforce law and order? The police are becoming too notorious for acting as spectators in situations where they should act decisively. Illegal oil bunkering on the seas usually involves the deployment of high finance and equipment. The Ilado tragedy provides useful hints in this direction. Who for instance are the owners of the five boats in the reports? What is their destination? The people in the affected communities would know. The tragedy must be thoroughly investigated. If there are persons who are still living who had a hand in it, they should be arrested and dealt with according to the law. Unless persons are punished for criminal conduct, oil theft will continue.

Oil is a curse to Nigeria. For 50 years, it has brought Nigerians much agony. Over-dependence on oil wealth, the scramble for it and for its control, has robbed the nation of the opportunity to look in other directions, and think more creatively. The people of Ilado and the neighbouring communities face a clear and present crisis: their source of water, the sea that runs through their villages has been polluted. Their beaches have become emergency graves. Both government and civil society groups should come to their rescue to prevent an outbreak of epidemic. It is a pity that the country lacks the capacity to identify the dead. Their individual identity is forever lost. That perhaps, is the bigger tragedy.

Robot  # 1 | 14.05.2006 09:58

...Read the full article.

Sam Kargbo  # 2 | 14.05.2006 18:41

Reuben,everyone of the poor souls killed at your familiar tragedy site is watching our lips and feeling the weight of our fingers.Yes those half counted dead souls were stupid and suicidal.They were criminals,though to my mind lesser criminals when compared to the Tafa Baloguns.But if the motivation is not poverty,if the push is not to have or save some nairas to attend to a few moment's or days' needs,then I wonder what else could have done that to them.Reuben, I am not certain that you know the name of poverty.Please kneel down and pray for forgiveness.Your angry article scares me as it gives me the feeling that a serious thinker like you cannot see poverty even when the souls of hundereds of fellow Nigerians are swimming on it. Sam Kargbo

emj  # 3 | 14.05.2006 19:11

Quote <I>Many Nigerians know that life is important, but they need to be so reminded so that when their interest in life is tested by the prospect of easy gratification, they would not throw both life and the gratification away under the guise of taking a risk. The media must also promote this campaign. As for the NNPC, it must take practical steps to upgrade, safeguard and monitor its pipelines. Access to the pipelines is too easy. Many of the pipelines have been washed to the surface due to years of erosion. They are old, weak and vulnerable in many places, having been in use since crude oil was discovered 50 years ago. The technology of pipeline use may also have to be reconsidered and the routes re-mapped. Educating the people about the dangers inherent in this type of folly might help, but poverty and greed is deep sitted Quote The illegal trade in stolen fuel at Ilado went on for many days before the tragedy that occurred at 3. 00 am on Friday, May 12. The police were aware of it but did nothing. Initial reports indicated that policemen received bribe from the fuel thieves and looked the other way. At Oke-Odo last month, they were chased away with stones and they gladly went away! Of what use are Nigeria's security agencies if they cannot always enforce law and order? The police are becoming too notorious for acting as spectators in situations where they should act decisively. Illegal oil bunkering on the seas usually involves the deployment of high finance and equipment. The Ilado tragedy provides useful hints in this direction. Who for instance are the owners of the five boats in the reports? What is their destination? The people in the affected communities would know. The tragedy must be thoroughly investigated. If there are persons who are still living who had a hand in it, they should be arrested and dealt with according to the law. Unless persons are punished for criminal conduct, oil theft will continue. You can imagine, the police that is supposed to enforce the law being complacent----and at the end of the day, so many lifes were lost. I watched how the dug the ground and buried the dead in mass grave, it is indeed sad. Quote Oil is a curse to Nigeria. For 50 years, it has brought Nigerians much agony. Over-dependence on oil wealth, the scramble for it and for its control, has robbed the nation of the opportunity to look in other directions, and think more creatively. The people of Ilado and the neighbouring communities face a clear and present crisis: their source of water, the sea that runs through their villages has been polluted. Their beaches have become emergency graves. Both government and civil society groups should come to their rescue to prevent an outbreak of epidemic. It is a pity that the country lacks the capacity to identify the dead. Their individual identity is forever lost. That perhaps, is the bigger tragedy. Till we shift our focus from oil to other viable source of income/revenue and harness them properly, we will continue to depend on oil. Our growth is stunted becos we refuse to think beyond the easiest way to earn a living, our greed hinders us from allowing ideas that are viable from seeing the light of day, etc etc Not being able to identify the dead is even a bigger tradegy, they were buried in mass grave. May the soul of the departed rest in peace. May this be an end of such tradegy in Lagos and Nigeria in general.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tsohon Soja  # 4 | 14.05.2006 21:54

Rueben Abati! Rueben Abati!! Fear God. Oil 'thieves' should be punished? When oil laden ships disappeared including their foreign crew? Who were punished? Some harpless Admirals, who were too scared of stepping on toes and of losing their years of Service. Do you even know where those Admirals are now, after all the hulla-ballow? It is only in Nigeria you hear of property stolen, yet the owner is not declared. Who is/are/were the owners of the huge amounts of 'stolen' crude oil on those 'missing ships'? Please be respectful of the dead. It is a divine order, to do so. Think of your own tomorrow. Do you know the sense of desparation of a 'responsible' father who comes back home and not having 'something for hand' to feed his children? Ha! May the souls of the departed and those who will certainly follow them in the 'noble' quest for 'life security', rest in peace. Amen. On a more serious note. Do you know we have a National Emergency Management Agency yet it is some 'poor' locals who were mobilised, laced with 'Ogogoro' (Their confession), to retrieve the dead from the scene? Please find out all the millions going into that agency, its beautiful seminars in 5-Star Hotels, New helicopter launched with pomp and pagentry at the Eagle square, etc. Yet... Na wah, for Nigeria!

Picasso  # 5 | 14.05.2006 21:58

Graphic Pictures - Do NOT look if you dont have the stomach!

Ani  # 6 | 15.05.2006 05:04

Do you know we have a National Emergency Management Agency yet it is some 'poor' locals who were mobilised, laced with 'Ogogoro' (Their confession), to retrieve the dead from the scene? Please find out all the millions going into that agency, its beautiful seminars in 5-Star Hotels, New helicopter launched with pomp and pagentry at the Eagle square, etc. Yet... It's about time that agency is looked into....we've had some tragedies in this country in the last one year and the agency is still invisible to the public.They should be made accountable for every penny given to them. The NNPC is not carrying out it's enlightenment campaign enough, they are just paying lip service to the term "enlightenment". The nigerians that i know; no matter how poor they are want to live. if a gunshot is heard at a market place or anywhere else, everyone runs for cover. is it this same nigerians that would risk their lives for a measly bucks if they are aware of the inherent dangers in the practice of vandalising pipelines? i don't think so. Govt. needs to step up a gear in educating folks about this dangerous act.

emj  # 7 | 15.05.2006 08:26

Home > Opinion & Analysis Daily independence The Root Of Our Poverty 15th May By Dan Amor The reality of poverty in Nigeria, nay Africa is overwhelming. Only recently, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), came up with a damning report about the staggering dimension of poverty in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular. It is in Africa that high quarters of government print money and circulate valueless treasury bills in a bid to encourage and build international confidence in the economy. It has not worked this far. The main source of poverty in contemporary Nigeria is the faulty distribution of the national resources and the deliberate promotion of laziness and despondency by successive governments through a centralised system of distribution of oil money. Also, national resources are pumped into non-productive sectors while the productive sectors are starved of funds. This attitude which has stretched over three decades or more has simply depressed and made nonsense of the purchasing power of the average Nigerian. Governments are forced in the face of a declining economy to retrench workers without provision of commensurate source of livelihood. A not-too-good artisan class of workers, a very unproductive graduate class of workers thrown into the labour market, simply have to fall to the poverty line. The emergence of a nouveau riche class, whose wealth is not expressed in capital assets, simply means an absence of investments on the part of the rich. Governments and the people lack the culture of industrialisation; therefore both private and public development of the industrial sector has become a mirage. Added to this is the lingering political destiny of the nation. The corporate survival of the nation is constantly being threatened by the intransigence of those who have been the beneficiaries of the old order for things to change. The oil boom of the early 1970s, rather than serve as a blessing, was a curse to the nation. The greed among the emergent military rulers, to share the oil wealth, was what actually triggered off the bout of military coups in the country. There was no attempt, no move to reinforce the social classes in a positive sense; instead the leadership set out to amass wealth at the expense of the country. A rich class whose members, raw in mind and greedy for wealth simply looted our national treasury dry. They became overnight multi-millionaires in military uniform. They pump their stolen money into excessive social gambling and in fact promote a generation of Nigerian female prostitutes both at home and in schools of higher learning . Power drunk and littered with government money, soldiers in the State Houses simply turned their backyards into brothels where young girls in their teens were used, corrupted and pushed to the streets to become professional harlots and mothers of an underclass of illegitimate children. Once initiated into this class, they ultimately become the burden of the Nigerian ghetto culture and armed robbers. Nigeria’s permanent underclass is the brainchild of the heartless and sadistic elite; so in their disbursement of national resources, every policy was tailored towards nurturing this underclass to death. They started dying when Shehu Shagari, a lame duck civilian president, came to power. He brought on board sons of Emirs whose social distance from the common man is proverbially contemptuous. They told Nigerians to eat from dustbins while they carted away the nation’s wealth into foreign banks in Britain and America. There was a time when the mere mention of a notorious Nigerian leader to a London or Swiss bank manager would give you automatic access to unqualified privileges. This was in spite of the unnerving weight of poverty among Nigerians at home. It is this situation that prompted the decision of rich nations to refuse cancellation of Nigeria’s debts. Nigeria owed over 36 billion US dollars to creditor nations. It is a kind of country in which the rich seek to remain rich at the expense of the poor. In Nigeria, areas like Ajegunle, Maroko in Lagos, Nyanya in Abuja, Obiagwu in Enugu, Television Village in Kaduna, etc are slums reserved exclusively for the poor. Despite the huge amount of money budgeted annually by successive governments, basic infrastructure like safe drinking water, good roads, hospitals, and electricity supply are not for the poor. The commonest form of accommodation is the single room "face me, I face you" type where a great number of people share one pit latrine, one bathroom and one kitchen. If Ajegunle represents the home of the neglected, Maroko represents the arrogance of power used by the rich to repress the poor class they invented. In one fell swoop in 1990, after allocating Maroko land to the rich, their poor shanties were brought down, including their belongings by a powerful team of bull-dozers supervised by a battalion of mobile policemen. And this was done without advanced notice to the poor inhabitants of the land. If a nation is serious about tackling poverty, why should it continue to repress the poor? Some scholars would argue that the transfer of resources from Southern Hemisphere to the North accounts for the poverty of the Third World, especially Africa. But against all empiricist realities, the bureaucracy of the drainage of resources is managed by Third World leaders who act as appendages of Western exploiters. Yet the historical factor in the generation and creation of poverty in Africa cannot be ignored. Reparations, debt relief or outright cancellations are just cries. Yet for us to see poverty totally as the child of these factors is to ignore the contemporary reality. The truth of today’s Africa is that there is a deliberate determination on the part of the leadership to create a poor class of Africans who are used as a reference point of real underdevelopment. This would serve as some sort of benign index of permanent jest to which an indifferent world will always react when laughing at Africa. Yes, people laugh at Africa. Then the African leaders themselves struggle to stave off this laughter by pointing to the underclass they have created as the real laughing stock. A fool’s paradise, a jester’s kingdom, nowhere in Africa, more than Nigeria has the exploiting class been using divinist and spiritual paradigms to help pauperise the underprivileged in our midst.

Chinedu Nwobu  # 8 | 15.05.2006 19:31

Dear Abati, you are waisting your time asking the government to carry out public enlightenement campaigns. The government does not give a damn about the life of Nigerians. Is it not the same Nigeria where you see human corpses on the streets? is it not the same Nigeria where the police kill people for 20naira? is it not the same Nigeria where people are massacred in the North periodically? is it not the same Nigeria where genocide was committed by the government against communities in Odi and Zaki biam?. Why should anybody beleive that such a government cares for the life of Nigerians? my brother please dont waste your time.We are still living in a jungle.When we come out of the jungle we will know. For now it is not yet "UHURU"