No fewer than 53 illegal oil refineries were at the weekend destroyed by the Nigerian Navy Ship (NNS Delta) at Asafa in Warri South-West council of Delta state.
Commander of the NNS Delta, Captain Musa Gemu, who made the disclosure, said the Commander of the Forward Operations’ Base (FOB) at Escravos, Navy Captain Adekunle Okeniyi, led the operations.
Gemu affirmed that the problem of oil theft had been reduced to the barest within his Area of Responsibility (AOR).
He, however, bemoaned the environmental degradation caused by the activities of oil thieves and advised the Federal Government to mandate the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to find means of evacuating seized stolen crude.
On the arrest of MV Maga and its crew, which was allegedly laden with about 520 metric tons of suspected stolen crude oil, he said the vessel and eleven crewmembers were under military escort at Sapele.
He explained that the vessel was nabbed at Dodo River in the wee hours of September 18, 2014, with about eleven crew members, all Nigerians, and that they would be handed over to the appropriate authorities for further investigations and prosecution.
He said: “What we need to do so that they don’t come back is we continue patrolling and destroying; when we do that, they will get tired. That is the only solution. But as far as my Area of Responsibility is concerned, illegal bunkering has drastically reduced, they are out of my place. You might probably find them in other places.
“We have gone farther more than you can think; I even thought we had finished destroying all illegal refineries in my area, just for us to have the intelligence report that there is one certain place in Asafa and we are able to get there on time to destroy the place. I assure you that those places we have previously destroyed have been permanently abandoned by these oil thieves.
“The challenges we face, you know most of them are natives, they know the terrain more than us so they go to places we can’t even imagine that such a thing exists.
“Also, inadequate boats that should be able to penetrate deep into the creeks, logistics is one of them and at this junction, I will urge our Chief of Naval Staff to urge the political masters to do more for the navy for us to achieve success in fighting illegal bunkering”.
