Militants blow up PPMC, NNPC pipelines in Delta

Militants blow up PPMC, NNPC pipelines in Delta

— 29th May 2016

FROM EMMANUEL OGOIGBE, WARRI

ARMED militants have again attacked crude oil and gas pipelines operated by the Pipelines and Product Mar­keting Company (PPMC) and Nigerian Petroleum Develop­ment Company (NPDC) Ltd, both subsidiaries of the Nige­rian National Petroleum Cor­poration (NNPC). A commu­nity leader confirmed this on Friday, just as the Niger Delta Avengers, which has been targeting energy facilities for weeks claimed responsibility for the attack. This is coming barely 24 hours after the Ni­ger Delta Avengers blew up Chevron’s Escravos pipeline.

“Another crude pipeline was attacked Thursday night near Batan oil field in Warri,” said Eric Omare, spokesman for the Ijaw Youth Council, which represents one of the largest ethnic groups in the vast Delta in southern Nige­ria.

“There were two simul­taneous attacks on (state oil firm) PPMC and NNPC pipe­lines,” he said, referring to the marketing arm of the NNPC.

The militant group tweet­ed later that they had blown up a gas and crude pipeline near the town of Warri that was protected by soldiers and operated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corpo­ration (NNPC).

“At 11:45pm on Thurs­day @NDAvengers blew up other #NNPC Gas and Crude trunkline close to Warri,” the group said on its Twitter feed. “To the IOCs, Indigenous Oil Companies and Nigeria Military, watch out something big is about to happen and it will shock the whole world”, they added.

Another tweet added, “The Niger Delta stake­holder’s meeting is an insult to the people of Niger Delta. What we need is a Sovereign State not pipeline contracts.”

It had claimed on the same platform an attack on Chev­ron’s main power feed in the Delta, which shut down the U.S. firm’s onshore opera­tions, according to a compa­ny source.

The Avengers, who have given oil firms until end of the month to leave, say they want independence for the Delta and have intensi­fied attacks in recent weeks, pushing oil output to its low­est in more than 20 years and compounding Nigeria’s economic problems.

Delta residents, some of whom sympathise with the militants, have long com­plained of poverty in an area producing oil accounting for 70 percent of national income.

The government has re­sponded by moving in army reinforcements but Brit­ish Foreign Minister Philip Hammond said this month that President Muhammadu Buhari needed to deal with the causes of poverty and anger about oil spills.

In the first signal that the government might try a less heavy-handed approach, Oil Minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said on Thurs­day an amnesty programme for former militants, signed in 2009 to end a previous insurgency, needed to im­prove.

A committee set up by Delta State leaders warned on Thursday that a military approach would not work and saw “an apparent con­sensus” that the Federal government and oil com­panies have neglected the grievances of local commu­nities.

Nigeria is now producing less than 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), less than An­gola and well below the 2.2 million bpd benchmark in the 2016 state budget.