Oil Thieves of the Niger Delta

Photograph by George Osodi for Darlingtons blog

“It’s not OK for us to be doing this, we know, but the government is not looking after us at all,” says Daniel Sekibo (pictured). “There were no jobs here, so what do we do?”

As night falls on a recent evening in the mazelike creeks of the Niger Delta, several oil thieves plunge into the dense, green mangroves along the Nun River.

Above the forest, black coils of smoke rise to the sky. The river hums with outboard motors as skiffs carry residents to communities in the web of Nun offshoots. The boats halt at military checkpoints, barges manned by idle soldiers. Silhouetted passengers raise their hands to show they are unarmed and not transporting stolen oil.

Daniel Sekibo leads the way. We are making our way to a camp near a Nigerian Agip Oil pipeline where he and his team, young men in their teens through thirties, refine stolen oil. The camp is a 15-minute walk from their village center, which is little more than a bar on a wooden deck a few feet above mud and water polluted with oil and trash.