BREAKING: Northern Group Backs Tompolo’s Tantita Security Services On Surveillance Contract Renewal
NORTHERN PEOPLE’s FORUM. (QUNGIYAR MUTANEN AREWA.)
OUR POSITION ON THE ARREST OF TANTITA STAFF
Re: Arrest of Tantita Operatives: Could this be an insidious orchestrated by dislodged oil thieves against Tantita?
The news that four operatives of Tantita firm, namely Asonja Goddey, Obajimi Oluwaseyifunmi, Awolowo Aribo, and Oluwadaisi Balogun, as identified by another staff member, Mr. Owoyele Omotuyi, have been arrested by the Nigerian Navy, shocked us to the marrow because the action doesn’t suit the status of such an important authority of the nation’s high body of security architecture.
We are constrained to broadcast our worries because by implication any circumstance under which the main source of the Nigerian economy is affected upsets our organization and this prompts us not only to speak up to express our concerns but to draw the attention of all relevant authorities and the general public.
This strong concern which we harbor, despite being a group existing in the faraway hinterland, only indicates how closely we have been monitoring and appreciating the impressive performance of Tantita in not only securing oil-producing communities but stabilizing production that makes the nation’s mono-economy also stable.
The loss of some four hundred barrels of crude oil every night, which is in the public domain, could not have been happening, without the possible complicity of those who have brazenly arrested these four innocent souls.
Even logically, the Navy officers and men are the only people that Tantita allows to move about across the coast it superintends being its primary function.
Not only that, even a minor child would understand that, but it doesn’t make that, Tantita would be so naive and stupid to allow its staff members to operate illegally wearing its conspicuous identity which its uniform represents. By being in their uniforms when they were arrested, it showed that they were on duty, not on any criminal mission.
Our inference therefore, is that some high-level web conspiracies or intrigues, had been woven in another attempt to discredit Tantita, and frame it up, with the sole aim of making the services it rendered no longer wanted by the Federal Government according to a contract mutually and legally entered into by the two parties.
May we advise the Navy to have its records straight, and the Federal Government not to play to the gallery orchestrated by some vested interests determined to create a situation full of far-reaching implications that could cause costly setbacks to oil production and the economy.
Needless to say, a chronicle of Tantita’s impressive performance of intercepting several vessels loaded with crude oil suspected to have been stolen, coupled with NNPC’s commendation of the Tantita Security outfit over the busting of many illegal loading points across the oil-producing states, ought to have earned the Navy’s appreciation and respect, to restrain itself from being so fault-finding towards Tantita.
This unbecoming fastidiousness exhibited by the Navy towards Tantita leaves our group and many quarters across the public, to our imaginations.
Could the attitude smack of primordial sentiment? One can’t help thinking this way, against the backdrop of how a Group called the Academy of International Affairs, led by a Yoruba Professor, Bolaji Akinyemi, challenged former President, Muhammadu Buhari against awarding Tantita Security Services Limited, the pipeline surveillance contract.
Is it not too much a coincidence that the Commander, NNS BEECROFT of the Nigeria Navy, Commodore Kolawole Olumide Oguntuga, behind the curious arrest in question, suddenly appear to have awaken out of his seeming slumber to foist several arrests in several places within two days of the Tantita operatives arrest, which the Naval authority could not afford the Federal Government previously in the era where crude oil theft assumed a criminal crescendo? It is a settled resolution in observable phenomenon that nothing comes from nothing – ex nihilo nihil fit. The apparent splurge of Naval activities is ominously in bad fate to blackmail Tantita which has done so well to mitigate crude oil theft and its associated illegal artesanal activities.
To be sure, the Nigerian Navy cannot afford to justify its own fabrication or shoot itself in the foot as we draw parallels between it and its previous activities in the oil river – the toolkit of corruption and violence and propaganda and the leader cult and the myth of national greatness … it’s something that recurs and those who don’t want Messrs Tantita to succeed simply ticks all the boxes.”
Rather than fight against Tantita , the Nigerian Navy should be involved in a new security parameter which consigns it to their primordial role to protect all blue lines and territorial waters while it works in partnership with Tantita who equally have a technical team with highly skilled specialists who collaborate with digital technologies to deliver any data in their cloud environment.
The NNPCL under Mr Mele kolo kyari should put in place a new philosophy to guide inter government relations between the Nigerian Navy and Tantita. It must recall that as advanced as the American army is, it has continued to make use of private security companies to fund its multilateral operations across the globe. That of Nigeria to protect our pipelines infrastructure should not be an exception because of a single overbearing agency.
As QUNGIYAR MUTANEN AREWA, We won’t fold our arms to watch things fall apart to cheap idiosyncrasies, or the personal individual interest of those desperate to dislodge Tantita, with no superior capacity to deliver.
A stitch in time saves nine.
Thanks and God bless.
Yours,
Comrade Saidu Bello.
Chairman of the Forum.
Comrade Aminu Saad Beli,
National Secretary
