Securing the asset without losing the community

An operator with a pipeline running through contested territory faces two problems that are usually handed to two different teams. Security is told to stop the theft, the sabotage, and the attacks on staff. Community relations is told to keep the neighbours onside. The two teams meet at the quarterly review and otherwise operate as if they were managing separate assets. They are not. On a linear asset that crosses other people’s land for hundreds of kilometres, protective security and social licence are the same problem seen from two ends, and the fastest way to lose one is to pursue the other in isolation.

The scale of the exposure is not in doubt

Nigeria’s crude oil theft is not a nuisance; it is a macroeconomic event. The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative has reported that the country lost 272 million barrels to theft and sabotage between 2016 and 2020. In 2022 the national oil company put losses at figures approaching 700,000 barrels a day at the worst point, enough to move the country’s fiscal position and its standing with lenders. Any argument that security is a discretionary cost collapses against numbers of that size. The asset has to be protected.

The question is not whether to secure the pipeline. It is whether the way it is secured builds or burns the consent that keeps it running.

Hard security without consent tends to fail twice

The historical record in the Niger Delta is that force applied without legitimacy does not produce durable security. It produces a cycle. The Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, the multi-stakeholder standard established in 2000 by governments, companies, and civil society, was created in large part in response to abuses by security forces attached to extractive operations, including in Nigeria. Its core expectation is unglamorous: that companies consult regularly with host communities about the security arrangements that affect them.

The candid assessments of how that has gone are not flattering. Analysts including EarthRights International have found the Principles largely ineffective in Nigeria in practice, with communities routinely excluded from the security planning that shapes their daily lives, even around operators that are signatories. The lesson is not that the standard is wrong. It is that security imposed on a community, rather than agreed with it, generates the very grievance that the next act of sabotage draws on. The guard force stops one breach and manufactures the constituency for the next. That is failing twice with the same budget.

What changed when the community was inside the perimeter

The most instructive recent case in Nigeria is the shift toward community-embedded surveillance. Tantita Security Services, led by the former militant leader Government Ekpemupolo, known as Tompolo, was engaged in partnership with the national oil company to protect pipelines in the Niger Delta. According to the company and Nigerian reporting, oil theft fell sharply, by figures cited around 79 percent between 2022 and 2023, with hundreds of illegal connection points and well over a thousand illicit refining sites uncovered, and long-dormant pipelines returned to service. A Nigerian court upheld the contract in 2025 amid political contestation over it.

The model is not without controversy, and the figures come from the operator and the press rather than from an independent audit, so they should be read as claims rather than settled fact. But the mechanism it points to is the part worth taking seriously. Surveillance conducted by people from the territory, with local knowledge and a stake in the outcome, reaches a level of coverage that an external guard force patrolling hostile ground never achieves. The people who once had reason to tap the line were given reason to protect it. That is not softness. It is the recognition that on a linear asset the only economically viable security is one the surrounding population is invested in, because no one can fence four hundred kilometres.

The community side of the ledger is now statutory

The Petroleum Industry Act of 2021 turned part of this logic into law. It requires upstream operators to contribute three percent of their annual operating expenditure to a Host Community Development Trust, a sum distinct from the older contribution to the Niger Delta Development Commission. The intent is explicit: to give host communities a direct, funded stake in the operation on their land, on the theory that a community which benefits from the pipeline has less reason to attack it and more reason to defend it.

The intent is sound and the implementation is uneven. Nearly four years after the Act, reporting indicates that many trusts remain only partly operational, and the same disputes over who controls the money and who counts as a host community that have dogged Delta development for a generation have followed the trusts. This matters for security directly. A poorly governed trust does not buy consent; it creates a new grievance with a new set of aggrieved parties, and grievance is the raw material of sabotage. The statutory three percent is an opportunity to fund the social side of security properly. It is not a substitute for governing it well.

Running the two as one

For an operator or a security partner, treating protective security and social licence as one mandate means a handful of concrete disciplines.

Plan security with the community, not only about it. The Voluntary Principles’ consultation requirement should be met in substance, not as a filed document. Communities that helped design the security arrangement are far less likely to treat it as an occupying presence, and far more likely to be the early-warning system that no camera provides.

Route the benefit to the people nearest the risk. Host-community funding, local hiring, and local procurement are security instruments, not just development ones. The closer the economic stake sits to the physical asset, the stronger the local incentive to keep it intact. Where the statutory trust exists, its governance is a security priority, because a captured or opaque trust actively creates enemies.

Hold force to a standard, in your own interest. Security providers whose conduct produces human rights complaints do not just create legal and reputational exposure; they create the next generation of adversaries and hand critics the story. Vetting, training to the Voluntary Principles, and a working grievance channel are not compliance overhead. They are how a security posture stays affordable over years rather than delivering a quiet quarter and a worse year.

Measure the leading indicators, not just the incident count. A falling number of breaches this month can coexist with rising resentment that will produce more breaches next year. The state of the relationship, the health of the grievance mechanism, and the community’s own account of whether the arrangement is fair are the metrics that predict next year’s incident count. The incident count itself only tells you about last month.

The point

The choice is often framed as security versus community, as if attention to one comes at the expense of the other. On a pipeline that framing is simply wrong. The community is the security, or it is the threat, and which one it becomes is decided by how the operator treats it long before anything is stolen. Guards, cameras, and surveillance technology are necessary and they are not sufficient. They protect an asset the surrounding population has a reason to leave alone. Manufacturing that reason, and not undermining it with the very force meant to protect the line, is the actual work. It sits at the seam between two teams that should be one.

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Sources: NEITI oil and gas industry reporting on theft and sabotage losses · The Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights · EarthRights International, Assessing and Improving the Voluntary Principles · Tantita pipeline surveillance: stakeholder assessment (BusinessDay) · Petroleum Industry Act 2021: host community development trusts (Goldsmiths Solicitors) · Five years on, PIA struggles to ease host community woes (BusinessDay)

This article is general guidance, not legal or security advice.