Leaks

“Drip…drip…drip…KABOOM!!!!...” This seems to be the recurring sound these days across Nigeria’s pipeline sites. Hundreds of charred cadavers lie strewn across the bordering right-of-ways, with flaming jerry cans scattered between the bodies like hideous confetti. Hours after, the infernos rage still, defying the dousing efforts of panicky villagers and mediocre firemen, billowing for days even under heavy-duty Julius Berger hoses, until they flag, falter, then fail, spent of fuel. Each time, the country’s oil monolith, the NNPC, blames the squalor-driven desperation of the corpses for the dastardly acts of roguery. Conveniently, the roasted slabs of flesh cannot protest, forever muted by the fires that claimed them and all decipherable evidence, while the real vandals slip away with their loot, mentally anticipating their next serpentine strike...

Pipeline vandalism is regularity in Nigeria, more than the authorities would have us believe, and only waxes sensational when there are fires. It is a super-coordinated franchise spanning through the crooked corridors of state, from the underhanded senators who employ the vandals, the compromised oil officials who detail such information as when the pipelines is actually carrying petrol, to corrupt customs men who grant passage and proffer bogus shipping documents ferrying the illicit premium motor spirit, i.e. petrol, to buyers in the black market. Usually the motives have been purely glut-driven, but recent attacks on an important flow station, the Atlas Cove, point to more macabre intentions.

‘Atlas Cove’ is a term that has been used frequently in recent news reports of the vandalism acts. Located in Mosimi, Lagos state, it is one of the nerve centres in Nigeria’s pipeline system from which imported gasoline is pumped to the rest of the nation, to the tune of 58-60 million litres monthly (“Er-hem, that is 36 million litres. Officially, of course”). Three weeks ago, an Awori pipeline supplying this site was vandalised and a fire started that killed over 270 people. Days later, flow units in Atlas Cove itself were vandalised. Repairs were hurriedly put through and for two weeks it was all-clear – until Tuesday last week, when the vandals struck again at an NNPC pipeline in the Ijegbu area of Lagos state, prompting the NNPC to suspend pumping to Atlas Cove yet again. And judging from the non-random nature of these attacks, they are not about to end anytime soon.

It’s been a steady build-up from as far back as February 8 2006, when the Escravos-Warri pipeline that transports crude oil to Nigeria’s Kaduna and Warri refineries were attacked. Since then, vandalism of products pipelines have occurred predominantly in three axes crucial to petroleum products distribution in the country i.e. the Atlas Cove-Mosimi, Abuja-Suleja and Port Harcourt flow stations, moving up from only 750 line breaks in 2003 to over 2700 between January and September last year, about the same time the politics hype began to herald the 2007 elections season. The systematic stab at Nigeria’s economic lifeblood is no error. Someone is attempting to force the nation to its knees, possibly for political reasons.

Meanwhile the government appears desperate to restore normalcy, diverting gasoline vessels to discharge at private depots. Pipeline sites are naturally bristling with the military. Security is however also being tightened surreptitiously in ways unconnected with the line breaks, with the police force beefed up numerically in strategically located states. To give you an idea, the state capital in which yours truly's domiciled has been supplied with enough servicemen to capably mount surveillance in grids of a 5-mile radius.

Is someone nudging Nigeria into an impending state of emergency? And to what pernicious end? Could it be phantom enemies of democracy that stand to benefit? Could it be Biafran secessionists - or perhaps protagonists of the botched Third Term campaign? Who in the world could be responsible? Who indeed…?

Annan and New Year Resolutions

peace (pēs) - tranquillity; freedom from war; cessation of hostilities; harmonious relations

pacifism (pas’i-fizm) - the belief that all international disputes can be resolved by arbitration; the doctrine that all violence is unjustifiable

When the clock struck midnight on the 1^st of January, 2007, a great many people may have greeted it with an expectant half-smile. They may have listened blissfully as the chimes rang out, each seemingly pregnant with the promise of some scintillating string of novel experiences, some titillating beginning, a fresh start. Not Kofi Annan. For him, the chimes were a death-knell heralding a hearse, with his career lying stiff as a stockfish in the coffin it bore.

Oh no, Annan was not fired. It’s just procedure. He’d served his term, he’d done his bit. And for the record, Annan embodied the quintessence of the international diplomat. His two-term tenure as secretary-general was not only unprecedented but a bizarre deviation from informal UN policy, a clear indication of his popularity among peers and masterly ambassadorial adroitness. During this time he executed a monumental streamlining of the institution, waged an unrelenting war on HIV/AIDS, and spun into action the Magna Carta of human rights restoration, the Millennium Development Goals Initiative, at a pace nothing short of unabashedly admirable. Not least of all, he was jointly awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize alongside the establishment he so selflessly served, a befitting crowning glory to a distinguished diplomatic career.

Annan could not rest easy on his laurels, however. This is because, if truth be told, Annan was not rewarded for being a peace-maker, but for being a pacifist. He’d honed the habit to fervently adjure against violence with the passion of a Pentecostal preacher, to preach peace with the piety of a Pope, when all he really advocated for was passivity, and for him, conflict resolution by arms was really not a question of conscience, but of convenience. His talent for equivocation was especially evident when 1,000,000 lives were chopped down in Rwanda because as UN Under-Secretary General, Peacekeeping Operations, he allegedly advised against an armed intervention in the interests of ‘regional stability’. Until years later when the outrage was universally vilified, the official UN definition of the Tutsi massacre was not outright genocide, but ‘acts of genocide’. But if he hadn’t proven his semantic skills with Rwanda, he definitely outdid himself with Darfur, where he spent three years orchestrating elaborate round-table ‘peace’ talks while the Janjaweed methodically decimated 400,000 Darfurians in cold blood. That bloodbath, thanks to him, is till date far from over.

The picture was not complete however. The world needed a scapegoat, and in his farewell speech, Annan left us in no doubt, proceeding to give America the best diplomatic dressing-down he could muster, proclaiming the world had become less safe because of America’s incursion on Iraq. Of course, if one gauges the 57,000 body count (or 100, 000 - or 500,000 for that matter, according to certain sources) as a result of that incursion against those enumerated above as a result of ‘peaceable arbitration’, there is no doubt to the rational mind why the world is less safe today. It makes one wonder what the outcome of World War II could’ve been if the fate of Great Britain had been left to Neville Chamberlain (the pacifist) and not Winston Churchill (the ‘warmonger’). What if America had not joined the Allied forces? What could’ve happened in Yugoslavia if NATO had not intervened? What would’ve become of Liberia or Sierra Leone today if the ECOMOG forces of West Africa had relented to intervene militarily, and proposed peace talk marathons instead? One sad yet inalienable fact history has taught us is that the majority of long-running conflicts experienced in our world has been perpetuated by psychopaths and megalomaniacs, for which the cold reality of the need for peace is driven home only if borne in the image of a bullet.

And if Annan were weak on history, perhaps he should’ve recalled from his Methodist school biology lessons that violence as a response to unjustified violence should never be ruled out because the human being is of necessity so conditioned by virtue of the basic ‘fight or flight’ instinct. Not that it would be any use teaching the distinguished sexagenarian new ‘tricks’. He lost that opportunity on Dec. the 31^st. Not you, though, dear reader. So get this: whatever your well-intentioned resolutions for the New Year, be sure that some of them will brace your back to the wall. And make no mistake, each time you vacillate, each time you hesitate, each time you relent to fight back, to ‘do the right thing’ regardless of cost, a piece of you will die, until your will crumbles inexorably from the inability to bear the brunt of failure. Then it will not matter whether you live to be 68 like Annan, or even a hundred. Every passing second will sound like a death-knell to you, because inside, you’re already dead.

Evil, they say, prevails when good men fail to act. Enough said. Have a blessed one, folks.