In the past few months, the Federal Government, which had lived in denial of the actual reason for the razor-sharp increase in oil bunkering, popularly known as kpofire, in the Niger Delta, had upped its game in the surveillance of oil pipelines with the engagement of private pipeline surveillance contractors. One contractor is Tantita Security Services Limited, TSSL, owned by the leader of the moribund Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND) and high chief of Ijaw ethnic nationality, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo. Misleading intelligence Before now, the security report was that some militants and other misguided miscreants, harboured by villagers in the different riverine communities in the oil-rich region, were the monsters breaking into the nation’s pipelines and haemorrhaging the country. The intelligence report acknowledged that they were major oil thieves bankrolling the operations of the minor oil thieves; it was unspecific in their nomenclature. Based […]