No Harness, No Hard Hat And No Truth From SEEPCO: Rigger Godwin Eshiet Okon Fell To His Death At Sterling Global OML 13 Tank Farm After The Pressurised Line He Was Bolting Burst Above Him

Secrets Reporters

The call reached the family after ten in the night on Tuesday, 20 October 2026. Godwin Eshiet Okon, a rigger at the Sterling Global tank farm at Atabrikang in Eastern Obolo, Akwa Ibom State, had had an accident, the caller said. He could not say anything. He had been rushed to hospital.

By the time his mother and his wife stood in the hospital the following morning, Okon was dead, and his body had already been packaged in a bag.

Members of the family told SecretsReporters that the fall that killed him happened in the afternoon of that Tuesday, hours before anyone reached them. His mother could not drive at night. A sibling was sent ahead to find out the nature of the accident, and at the hospital the sibling was not allowed to see him. The doctor was dressing his wound, the sibling was told, and the sibling waited on that word through the night, until the morning, when Okon’s mother and his wife arrived and the hospital pronounced him dead.

The night the family was kept outside

The road Okon travelled after the fall ran from hospital to hospital. He was taken first to Immanuel Hospital in Eket, then to another hospital in Uyo, then to Ibom Specialist Hospital, his family said. At no point on that road did the family hear from the company what work their son and husband was doing when he fell.

What company personnel told the family, the family said, was that Okon fell from height. Nothing more. No word of the job. No word of the line that burst.

The family took his body home to Ibeno on Wednesday, 21 October 2026, and put him in the morgue.

What the men on the scaffold saw

The account of the work itself comes from an eyewitness, and members of the family said the company never allowed that witness to speak to them.

Okon worked as a rigger, the eyewitness said, and he was pulled up to work on a pressurised line for a hydro test. Three of them stood on the scaffold, tightening bolts on the line, while the engineer supervising the test, an Indian the workers know as Damara, kept increasing the pressure. The line exploded while Okon stood in the line of fire, and the force of the burst pushed the scaffold over.

None of the three men wore a harness. None of them wore even a hard hat, the eyewitness said.

The other two men never reached the floor. Their coveralls caught and hung on a scaffold pipe, and there they stayed until they were brought down. Okon fell directly to the ground.

Work at height in the petroleum industry runs on permits, harnesses and pressure limits, and the Petroleum Industry Act places the safety of every worker on a facility on the operator of that facility. A hydro test raises water pressure inside a line to prove the line can hold, and the men who bolt a line under test stand inside the danger the test itself creates. The family’s account describes three men sent into that danger with nothing on their heads and nothing tied to their bodies.

Okon’s death also carries a duty the family says has not been met. An operator must report a fatal incident on its facility to the regulator, and under the Employees’ Compensation Act 2010, the dependants of a worker killed in the course of his work are entitled to compensation through the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund. The family is still waiting to be told, by the company, what work killed him.

Sterling Global and Eastern Obolo

Sterling Global is Sterling Oil Exploration and Energy Production Company Limited, SEEPCO, the operator of the OML 13 marginal field, an arm of the Sandesara group. The tank farm at Atabrikang sits in a host community that has carried grievances against the company for years.

The Akwa Ibom State Government has publicly condemned what it called the unfair and inhumane treatment of indigenes in the company’s employ, and at a tripartite meeting in Uyo the government’s negotiator told the company’s management to its face that the state would not stand and watch its people humiliated in their own state. The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board has opened a probe into SEEPCO over expatriate quota violations and anti-labour practices, following protests by petroleum workers over the company’s preference for foreign hands over qualified Nigerians. In 2025, an oil spill from the company’s Durga 4 rig in the same OML 13 ran for months through the creeks of Eastern Obolo, through Emere-Oke and Akpabom, into the Atlantic, while the communities waited for the company to stop it.

Into that record, the family of Godwin Eshiet Okon now adds a rigger sent up a scaffold without a harness or a hard hat, a family informed after ten at night of an accident that happened in the afternoon, a brother kept outside a ward all night on the word that a wound was being dressed, and a mother and a wife who met their son and husband in the morning already sealed in a bag.