Laden with the best of our sweetest crude,
Nice, smooth stuff, low-sulphur delight
Choicest take on the global market
Proud and prompt, it swayed on the sea
Parting waters bowed to
The weight of its wealth
Its fame spread beyond our shores
Banks beckoned, princes doffed their hats
Docks threw open their eager doors
But its charge, alas, was illegal,
Its costly cargo stolen from our sleeping shores
And so when sighted mid-sea
And pursued like a fleeing robber
It ran and ran, descending, clean,
Into the belly of the whale
From Bomadi to Abuja
From Forcados to Funtua
Sea hounds raced after the missing ship
Armed with candles
In the middle of the day
And hurricane lanterns and microscopes
They searched the waters
They combed the sands
They asked the minnows in their wondering shoals
The waters laughed
The minnows were amused
The sands chuckled beneath
Their floundering feet
They fumed and fumbled:
The Police blamed the Army
The Army cursed the Customs
The Customs nailed the Navy
The Navy neighed like a harried horse
Oh crude, crude, crude, this crude war
On our wondrous and wasted shores
A loaded tanker took to its heels
Vanishing fiam into the fish’s belly
A sticky truth, a viscous (de)vice
There is a salty ring in the voice
Of our lying chiefs.
Prince and prophet by day
A plundering pirate by night
The bunkerer has the key to the house of power
He knows the tricks of tribe and bribe:
Lift your loot and leap into wealth
This bounteous boom, our dreadful doom
Our blighted land and viscous rivers
Our nights aflare from infernal gas
The country is dumb, the Law is dead
This little ode to our faltering stride
And the vanishing magic of African Pride
* First published in 2004 under the title ‘The Amazing Story of MT African Pride, Oil Tanker’. Republished here with minor amendments in response to another incident of Nigeria’s recurring oil theft.
Niyi Osundare