Abstract:

The emergence of the crime of oil theft and illegal refineries is not sudden but the realization of its negative economic impact on the national economy and the business of multinational oil companies have taken the State and the companies by storm shortly after the Presidential proclamation of amnesty in 2009 was configured to fob-off militancy in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. This paper attempts to address the resource curse of oil theft and illegal refineries in the region from a legal theoretical framework running through the various socio-legal theories through which the crime can be viewed and explained. It panders to the critical theoretical school which attributes the causes mainly to State and multinational oil company failures in infrastructural development and social responsibility commitments to the indigenous minority ethnic communities of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria rather than the orthodox school which blames the militants for ‘greed not grievance’ instincts. It employs the analytical, historical and doctrinal methods in presenting and analyzing its research data and in drawing its conclusions. The paper finds that two major and mutually repugnant tendencies in the explanation of the crime crop up from the research records. The one pursued by State actors which is anti-recognition and vehemently opposed to oil theft and local refineries and which calls for their bombardments and annihilation through the instrumentality of military strike force, JTF, and the other which is purveyed by non-State actors which is pro-oil theft that believes that the best approach ought to be condonation, legal regulation and mainstreaming of the phenomenon as part of an indigenous building block of development. This latter perspective discountenances the employment of brute force in the confrontation of the phenomenon and is thus recommended in this paper.