Of Dangote refinery controversy and Oby Ezekwesili’s gobbledygook

BY EMEKA J. EMENIKE

A former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, has joined in the Dangote Refinery/Nigerian oil regulatory agencies fray. In her current enterprise, she has spewed quite a measure of gobbledygook 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 disappointing but also troubling.

Ezekwesili re-echoed the jaded position she held on to, while in government, for which she is now robbed of objectivity in her current enterprise of weighing into the spat. She freely descended into the arena instead of assuming the moral high ground, which is the bulwark of fairness.

In a rather outlandish 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 had 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.

Read her: “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 issues; rather, she resorted to scurrilous 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 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, the 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 GCEO 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 does not borrow from the IMF. It did not also borrow for itself. What, as learnt, transpired was that NNPC facilitated a loan of $1b for stake in the Dangote Refinery, which the energy company, as gathered, paid straight to Dangote. The loan was backed by 35kbbls/day 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 is still wallowing in the pool of her ancient fixation about the “opacity” of the NNPC of yore which Kyari’s TAPE had already dismantled as far back as 2019. The culture of opacity had cave in under the weight of 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 it (company).

In any case, I believe that NNPC is not afraid of a NEITI probe of the 7.2% NNPC shares in the Dangote Refinery. Validation: NNPC has been a transparency partner with NEITI (and its global partner, EITI). I also believe that the Nigerian Government will never fold its arms and watch a single business operator monopolise an essential commodity like petrol, while potentially putting Nigeria’s energy security at risk. The proclivity towards 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. Unfortunately, Ezekwesili, who is enlightened enough to understand the contending issues, is still fixatedly dwelling on the past. Shameful

Emeka J. Emenike, a lawyer, writes in from Lagos.