Tanya Davidson
Abuja — The Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre, YEAC-Nigeria, has warned against what it described as the growing use of citizens’ deaths as a de-facto tool for securing Nigeria’s oil, gas and solid mineral resources, urging government to pursue economic alternatives to illegal resource exploitation.
Executive Director of YEAC-Nigeria, Dr Fyneface Dumnamene Fyneface, said recent deaths linked to alleged illegal petroleum activities in Rivers State and the deaths of 37 artisanal miners in Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, custody in Niger State exposed the failure of enforcement-only approaches to natural-resource governance.
Fyneface argued that Nigeria had continued to rely on arrests, security operations and pipeline protection without adequately addressing the economic conditions that push citizens into illegal resource extraction.
His intervention followed the reported deaths of 37 suspected illegal miners in NSCDC custody in Minna on September 17. The Federal Government has constituted an independent 10-member committee to investigate the circumstances of the deaths, while the cause remains under investigation.
Fyneface contrasted the public reaction to the Niger incident with what he described as the lack of comparable attention to reported deaths associated with petroleum activities in Rivers State.
He said the broader question for government was whether citizens involved in illegal resource activities should continue to be treated primarily as security threats rather than as people who could be brought into regulated economic activity.
From illegal mining to illegal refining
According to Fyneface, YEAC-Nigeria had proposed alternatives for both artisanal mining and crude oil refining several years before the recent deaths.
He recalled the launch of the Presidential Artisanal Gold Mining Development Initiative, PAGMI, by the Federal Government in July 2020, aimed at integrating artisanal miners into the formal economy.
Eight days after the launch, he said, he proposed a corresponding Presidential Artisanal Crude Oil Refining Development Initiative, PACORDI, to provide a framework for bringing artisanal refiners into a regulated system.
Fyneface said the PACORDI proposal was subsequently developed into a policy document and presented to government through engagements with the National Assembly and other platforms.
“With these two initiatives for illegal miners and artisanal refiners in the North, West and South on the table, one wonders what the federal government is still waiting for to fully activate them and save the lives of citizens interested in the solid minerals, mining, oil and gas sectors,” he said.
He argued that formalisation, alternative livelihoods and regulated participation could address some of the economic drivers behind illegal extraction while allowing government to impose environmental and safety standards.
‘Deaths cannot be resource governance’
Fyneface said the deaths of citizens involved in illegal activities should not become an acceptable consequence of protecting petroleum infrastructure or mineral resources.
“We must not allow the death of citizens involved in illegal activities, which the authorities and facility owners failed to prevent by protecting their facilities and pipelines, to become a new tool and solution for natural resource governance, product security and pipeline protection in Nigeria,” he said.
He also criticised oil companies and government security agencies over pipeline protection, arguing that responsibility for preventing third-party interference should not simply be transferred to communities or civilian security arrangements.
YEAC-Nigeria has itself advocated community-based approaches to pipeline protection and alternative livelihoods, including its Solar Mini-Grid Electricity Facilities for Communities Without Electricity initiative, which Fyneface said was conceived following his experience after a 2019 kidnapping in B-Dere, Gokana Local Government Area of Rivers State.
Shell case does not yet establish final liability
Fyneface also cited the ongoing Alame and Others v Shell litigation in the United Kingdom in support of his argument concerning oil companies’ responsibilities for infrastructure protection.
However, the latest September 10, 2026 judgment does not constitute a final finding that Shell is liable for third-party vandalism.
The High Court, in that decision, allowed claimants from Bille to advance a case that systemic failures by Shell and its former Nigerian subsidiary contributed to spills between 2011 and 2013, including through failures relating to the security of infrastructure against third-party intervention. The substantive liability trial is scheduled for 2027.
The distinction is significant because the court has not yet determined the ultimate liability on those claims.
‘Government must listen to citizens’
Fyneface said the recurring deaths should force a reassessment of Nigeria’s approach to resource governance, particularly as the country seeks to maintain oil production while responding to the global energy transition.
He argued that Nigeria should use the period in which crude oil remains commercially important to develop safer and more regulated ways for citizens to participate in the petroleum economy.
“Solutions provided by the people should have been speedily reviewed and considered for implementation, not perennially ignored while citizens continue to die in their numbers,” he said.
He called for stronger economic inclusion and alternatives to organised criminality, arguing that survival-driven participation in illegal extraction undermines both the rule of law and democratic accountability.
“The lives of citizens must be important to the government at all levels,” Fyneface said.
He urged the Federal Government to review and implement viable community-based proposals for formalising artisanal activities, expanding alternative livelihoods and improving environmental and safety standards across Nigeria’s resource-producing regions.
“Government policy or policy failures must not graduate from citizens dying for oil to the state systematically killing citizens by looking away as part of ways of providing natural resource governance, product security and pipeline protection,” he said.
He called for a participatory approach to resource governance in which communities and civil society organisations are treated as sources of policy solutions rather than merely as stakeholders to be engaged after crises occur.
