Nigeria’s vandalised pipelines and stolen cables

Nigeria’s infrastructure theft has two faces, the pipeline vandalism that threatens fuel supply and the cable theft that takes the power and communications networks apart, and both feed into a scrap trade whose formal side is now being built. The country’s organised producer responsibility system is arriving at the same moment the theft problem keeps recurring, which is a coincidence of timing that matters, because the instrument that would document the legitimate trade is the instrument that would make the stolen material visible as well. The two problems have always been one problem, which is a trade that records nothing. The pattern’s persistence is the tell, because a vandalism problem that survives commodity cycles is an infrastructure security problem with a market attached, and the market side of it is the one the country’s policy has instruments for.

The vandalism pattern is documented by the institutions that carry its costs, and the description does not require new evidence. The national pipeline operator’s reporting has carried vandalism as a recurring operating cost for years, with fuel losses, explosion risk and repair burden, and the power and telecommunications distribution networks describe the same pattern in copper, with substation and overhead conductor losses recurring along the network. What the two have in common is the destination, which is a scrap trade that runs from the collector through to aggregation and onward to foundries and re-rollers, almost none of it recorded, and a port system that has simultaneously received the region’s largest recorded second-hand imports.

The formal side’s arrival is the other half of the story, and it is further along than the theft reporting suggests. The National Environmental (Electrical and Electronics Sector) Regulations date from 2011 and were amended in January 2023 to strengthen extended producer responsibility, and the E-waste Producer Responsibility Organisation Nigeria maintains the producer registry and collects fees to fund collection, awareness, research and standards. The Global E-waste Monitor records Nigeria generating about 500 million kilograms of e-waste in 2022, the largest total in West Africa, and the 2019 transboundary figures put Africa’s recorded imports at 546 million kilograms with 527 million arriving outside the Basel Convention’s controlled procedures, the illicit share of inspected Nigerian shipments measured at one-third or more by weight. A collection system that documents material would document both the legitimate and the stolen fraction, and the theft problem is the argument the registry’s own designers have not yet had to make.

The economics of the theft sit in the regional flows the Monitor measures. Africa’s documented formal collection is 25 million kilograms against 3.55 billion generated, 0.7 per cent, and the estimated 18 billion kilograms handled in low- and lower-middle-income countries mostly by the informal sector carries around 12 billion US dollars of processed metals. The region’s scrap economy is a working trade at a scale the formal sectors are nowhere near, and the theft from Nigeria’s pipelines and cables is the part of that trade whose origin no one records. The world’s metal value in the same report, 91 billion US dollars with documented management capturing 28 billion, describes what the documentation gap is priced at, and the Nigerian gap is a large share of it.

Why now is the registry’s operating period, because a fee-funded collection system that is starting to pay for material is exactly the moment the stolen fraction becomes separable from the legitimate one. The world picture tightens the same way elsewhere: generation rising five times faster than documented recycling over the decade to 2022, and the global documented rate projected at 20 per cent by 2030. Nigeria’s pipeline costs and its cable losses are priced into the operating budgets of the institutions carrying them, and the country’s scrap trade is the one point both streams pass through, which is what makes the register a security instrument as well as an environmental one.

What should happen is the extension of the registry’s documentation to the metal trade the stolen material enters, because the producer registry and the metal dealer layer are currently two systems that do not meet. A registered metal dealer with seller identification, weighbridge records and bank settlement would receive stolen material visibly rather than invisibly, which is the effect every equivalent register has produced wherever it has been enforced, and the pipeline and cable losses become measurable at the point they enter the trade rather than only at the point they are missed. The E-waste Producer Responsibility Organisation’s registry is the model to extend and the collection fee is the mechanism that makes the extension worth the dealer’s while.

For traders, the Nigerian market is the one where documentation is scarcest and therefore most valuable, and the country’s registry is the instrument that would produce it. The formal collection figures the Monitor records are the starting position rather than the capacity, and the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 holds both them and the transboundary account that describes the country’s import position. The Basel Convention governs the cross-border fractions, and platforms such as scrap.trade carry the documented trade that a registered collecting layer would produce.

Nigeria’s vandalised pipelines and stolen cables are two descriptions of one trade that records nothing, and the registry now being built is the point at which the description changes. The security case and the collection case are the same case here, which is the argument the country’s recycling policy has not made yet and will not need a second act to make. The two datasets the country already holds are enough to make it, and the register the policy would produce is the instrument both cases have been waiting for.