Oby Ezekwesili and the Dangote refinery controversy, By Emeka J. Emenike

To be sure, the former minister failed to address the pertinent issues; rather, she resorted to disparaging attacks against the NNPC and its leadership, deploying innuendoes and insinuations in an obvious gambit to demonise the company. That, for me, is the height of absurdity. If not, how could one explain the former Minister’s reference to the NNPC as a Federal Republic inside another Federal Republic?

A former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, has joined in the Dangote Refinery/Nigerian oil regulatory agencies fray. In her current enterprise, she has said quite a lot against the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd). Whereas, she is free to hold an opinion on developments in the polity, her intervention in the above subject matter has not only been quite troubling.

Ezekwesili re-echoed the clichéd position she held onto while in government, which makes her not objectivity in the manner of her weighing into the present spat. She freely descended into the arena instead of assuming the moral high ground, which is the bulwark of fairness.

In a rather unusual position disguised as a call for “an independent audit of why the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited capped its investment in the Dangote Petroleum Refinery at 7.2 per cent instead of the planned 20 per cent,” Ezekwesili poured invectives on the NNPC Ltd. She claimed, through her official X handle, that she had earlier decided not to speak on the Dangote refinery. She would thereafter go down the memory lane, in her determined bid, to tar the NNPC Ltd and its management with a brush of malfeasance.

As she put it: “When we were in government, I often told the NNPC leadership that they cannot carry on as though there is a ‘Federal Republic of the NNPC’ just because they think of themselves as ‘the goose that lays the golden egg.’ The opacity of the NNPC was the reason we took great delight in designing the multi-stakeholders Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency International in those early 2000s that I pioneered as Chairperson.”

Ezekwesili had further claimed that they went above global minimum voluntary standards of transparency requirements by enacting NEITI as the transparency regulator of the oil and minerals sector, and concluded by calling on President Bola Tinubu “to immediately use the instrumentality of NEITI to launch an independent audit of the Dangote refinery-NNPC transaction to offer the public the true state of play.”

To be sure, the former minister failed to address the pertinent issues; rather, she resorted to disparaging attacks against the NNPC and its leadership, deploying innuendoes and insinuations in an obvious gambit to demonise the company. That, for me, is the height of absurdity. If not, how could one explain the former Minister’s reference to the NNPC as a Federal Republic inside another Federal Republic?

If that was the case, then it means the administration in which Ezekwesili served was never a sovereign government.  That was because there was shared sovereignty in the context of her claim of the existence of a Federal Government within another Federal Government. This position also largely discounts the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo in which she served as Education minister, given the strategic position of the NNPC in revenue generation for bolstering public finance.

NNPC, under the administration in which Mrs Ezekwesili served as head of NEITI and minister is not the same as the NNPC under the administration of President Bola Tinubu. On the watch of Mele Kyari as group chief executive officer of NNPC Ltd, which used to be opaque under previous leaderships, is no longer opaque. The Kyari leadership is operating the national oil company on the philosophy of Transparency, Accountability and Performance Excellence (TAPE), which abhors opacity.

A recent report said that since the appointment of Kyari as the Group CEO of the NNPC Ltd, the company has been conducting its businesses transparently. According to the report: “It is in furtherance of its transparency push that it signed up as a supporting company of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2019 to become a member  of EITI’s state-owned enterprise network. With that, it upgraded its operations to meet the standard for EITI supporting companies. Since then, NNPC Ltd has not looked back in its transparency journey, publishing every information that the public should know. In the face of various allegations of financial malfeasance, NNPC Ltd has always made itself available for probes and/or opportunities for reconciliation of figures with other agencies of government  as the case may be; and, it has always been vindicated.”

There was, along the line, a claim that NNPC borrowed $1 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). From my findings, NNPC did not borrow for itself but had facilitated a loan of $1 billion for a stake in the Dangote Refinery, which the energy company, as gathered, paid straight to Dangote. The loan was backed by 35kbbls/day of crude and the loan had been fully settled in June 2024. This can be fact-checked.

Indeed, these are facts that Ezekwesili should seek to verify and validate. But, unfortunately, she appears rather fixated on the “opacity” of the NNPC of yore, which Kyari’s TAPE had already dismantled as far back as 2019. The culture of opacity had caved in under Kyari’s leadership, which has thrown almost completely wide open for public scrutiny, the books of the energy company.

This current state of affairs in the NNPC Ltd speaks volumes about the transparency and accountability drive of the current leadership of the company for which NEITI has, time and again, commended the company for.

In any case, I believe that NNPC is not afraid of a NEITI probe of the 7.2 per cent NNPC shares in the Dangote Refinery. As validation: NNPC has been a transparency partner with NEITI (and its global partner, EITI). I also believe that the Nigerian government will not fold its arms and watch any single business operator monopolise an essential commodity like petrol, while potentially putting Nigeria’s energy security at risk. The proclivity towards the monopoly of petrol supply and the potential threat of that scary scenario to energy security are the core themes of conversation that well-meaning Nigerians are driving at this point. However, Ezekwesili, who is enlightened enough to understand the contending issues, seems stuck on an old narrative. This is quite unfortunate.

Emeka J. Emenike, writes in from Lagos.