The burnt landscape of an illegal oil refinery in the Niger Delta
The vegetation ended abruptly and the colour of the landscape turned from green to black. I was getting a rare look at the booming trade in refined stolen crude oil in southern Nigeria.
"Here is our business place," a man, who did not want to give his real name but asked to be called Edward, told me as we walked around a remote, heavily polluted palm-tree fringed creek in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta.
"We use these to go and collect our natural resources - our crude oil," he said, pointing to a locally carved boat lying on its side.
In the middle of the night, to avoid detection, they break into the multinational oil companies' pipelines and help themselves.
Dotted along the creek were dozens of large drums used for boiling up the crude oil.
They had pipes protruding from them leading to troughs into which the products are collected; kerosene and petrol for the local market and diesel which is taken away on barges or inland on trucks by traders.
Next to each home-made refinery are pits full of bitumen which is sold to road construction companies.
"Almost 400 people work here and every night we produce around 11,000 litres of diesel," said 32-year-old Edward, adding that his elder brothers had learnt all about the business in Bakassi, near the Cameroonian border with Nigeria.
Source: BBC News
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