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

Source:Saharareporters.