The goings-on between the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) and Dangote Refinery Limited attracted the attention of Prince Adewole Ebenezer Adebayo, leader of the Social Democratic Party SDP and candidate in the 2023 general election, who, in this interview, x-rayed the unholy alliance between the NNPCL and Dangote Refineries, insisting that they must engage in healthy competition to give Nigerians cheaper and more affordable Petroleum products. He also spoke on the forthcoming 2027 general elections, insisting that the only way President Bola Tinubu can be retained in Aso rock in 2027 is to change his government’s retrogressive policies. ADA OKAFOR brings excerpts of the interview.
Did President Bola Tinubu’s decision to change the leadership of the NNPCL come as a surprise, and what do you make of it?
Well, it’s an executive prerogative because he is the Minister of Petroleum. So, even if he wasn’t, he is the Chief Executive of Nigeria. So, now that he’s Minister of Petroleum, it means that he has looked at what he wants to achieve and he feels that he needs to rejig his team. I wouldn’t say I wasn’t expecting it to come.
I was expecting it to come earlier with respect to the fact that Mr. Mele Kyari has survived three presidents. He had the first term of President Buhari, second term of President Buhari, and now he’s into almost half of President Tinubu’s entire presidency. So, I thought that with some of the objectives that he set in place, I was wondering how they were going to do it, because the management needed to change if the tactics were going to change.
So, if he’s done it now, well, I’ll keep my gun powder dry, but I will imagine that there are major problems in the upstream sector. I think in the downstream, the NNPCL has managed to survive the problems of incessant scarcity of products. They’ve managed to revive at least one of the refineries, the Port Harcourt Refinery, and I think the one in Warri appears to be coming on stream, and Kaduna has gone far too.
So, with respect to the downstream side, I think they’ve done quite okay, especially with the pipelines, the gas pipeline, the AKK that they’re doing. So, they are most successful in the downstream. So, I think the President wants to pivot to the upstream, because I know Bayo Ojulari’s records, and I think the upstream sector is probably where they want to try their luck now. But, it doesn’t mean that the change of this board could not have been done better.
I expected that if I were the President, I would have asked those who are on the board to resign, rather than just fire them like that, especially since you’ve managed to renew their mandate only recently. But, I don’t have all the personnel file, and I don’t know what he has seen, but I thought that with what I’ve seen them achieve outwardly, especially in the last three years, I thought that would have been more honourable to have asked them to resign, rather than just fire them like that.
What do you make of the choice of Ojulari, his background and his profile, what do you make of it? Would you say it’s a fantastic decision from the president?
Ojulari is a qualified professional in the field and I respect that, but there are hundreds of them, or let me not be uncharitable, there are dozens of them. What’s going to make a difference is not whether you had an engineering background or whether you had a marketing background. What’s going to make a difference is how you relate with the chief executive.
The relationship must be such that it’s virtually an independent one, because the president is a politician. He has political objectives. He runs a public sector system. He can print his own money if he wants to and he can burst his budgets. But, for a private sector-oriented NNPCL, you have to live within your means, you have to play by the market rules and you have to listen to professionals more than you listen to politicians. You have to do what makes sense in the long run for the shareholders, even though the Nigerian people are the shareholders.
Which means that there will be a philosophical conflict between what the President wants to achieve politically and what the NNPCL wants to achieve commercially and corporately.
If you look at Kyari’s era at the NNPCL, especially with the kind of politics that was being played with pricing and the competition between the Dangote and the NNPCL in the sale of product, if you were to tell Mr Ojulari something that will be valuable for the benefit of Nigerians, what would that be?
From what I see, we need to understand that NNPCL is not the regulator. The regulator of the product range, will be the downstream regulator, and NNPCL is not, though it’s a shareholder in the private refinery of Dangote, but they have their own refineries too, and they have their own value chain. So, we should expect some reasonable competition if we are adopting the market approach. I don’t think that NNPCL would want to fall on the sword just to make Dangote a little more profitable. So, a bit of competition between them is not bad.
If they are competing in unethical way and they are allowing for joining towards the perfect market where supply and demand will meet without necessary inhibition; so I don’t think as president I would, tell my own refinery or my own company that has its own refinery, to just please a private sector person that will have its own refinery.
But, high and above Dangote and the NNPCL, will need to have a plan to make fuel affordable to Nigerian people. And those are regulatory decisions not taken at the level of the NNPCL, which is to license more refineries to produce more and to create financial incentives for those who want to improve our refining capacity in Nigeria rather than pay for those who want to import from abroad because if you import from abroad, you are exporting labour and productivity overseas and poverty into your own country through unemployment. So, there are different levels of decision making here.
It looks like Tinubu wants the Warri and the Port Harcourt refineries to work optimally. And he has given a specific task to Ojulari to give him 2,000,000 barrels per day in the next two years and 5,000,000 barrels per day in the next five years. Is this a banana peel for Ojulari?
All I can say is that I am not easily enthused by politicians giving corporate directives to a company that has their own board and their own management targets and realities. So, this automatic alacrity issue, I think, is more for the political optics. You don’t make your decision on the day you put a new CEO. Usually, there is a long-term plan. And if I hear these numbers correctly, they are not far from what Kyari was pursuing.
I think the best we can say is that the president is probably re-echoing what he has been briefed before by the former administration or the target he had with the previous administration and he is letting Mr. Ojulari to know that these are the things we are aiming at achieving. But, I don’t think it’s something that he has just carved out for Ojulari. It is something that the old management also was pursuing. And time will tell if Mr. Ojulari is going to be able to do better, especially as part of the lead time for performance has been undertaken by the Kyari led-group. The past management has started that journey. And even in the downstream side, there have been some new arrangements with the IOCs to explore new fields and to meet the target because of the fiscal problem that Nigeria has. If you look at our budget, we are not meeting the OPEC quota they are giving to us. And we have a very large population and we have budget deficits.
And we are also now improving our refining capacity. So, we need to have more crude to be given as feedstock to the local refineries. So those targets, I don’t think that even if you remove Ojulari tomorrow, the targets will change. I would expect three things. One, those targets look too modest. Maybe the president understands the executive and management capacity of NNPCL. But, I would think that those targets, if I were president, they are too modest. They should have been at least twice that target. Secondly, how they perform also depends on the angle that the president shows to them.
If the president allows them to run as corporate people, commercial people, and there’s less pressure to use the golden egg of the NNPCL to finance the political programme of the government, to finance the deficit of the government, and all of that. If they allow them to work on their through and develop their value chain, and have a proper healthy balance sheet that you will find in Petrobras and some other competitors that they might have. If you follow that petroleum marketing or petroleum production or petroleum industry accounting standards where there are no opaque parts where you’re just financing politics or funding public sector programme, Ojulari will be a lucky person.
But, when it comes to Kyari, he has his own problems. We must give him some kudos because his ability to transform from the same NNPCL where the majority of their crude was being stolen to one where they have addressed it and reduced the theft to where they are able to carry on projects is commendable.
I remember when the Chinese pulled funding from the AKK pipeline. I was surprised. I was impressed that they were able to use their own internal funding to carry on that project and not fail. So, we should give kudos to Kyari.
And the fact that he was an NNPCL originally, rose through the ranks to the top, shows that the corporate memory of that organisation is capable of producing if not the Ojulari type, if you give them kind of a new orientation. So, the buck lies with the president because if it starts with a commercial mind, start with clear targets, but when it’s under pressure, when elections come, when you need money to fund elections, when you need to satisfy social programmes, if you start to put pressure on Ojulari, he might become another Kyari or the earlier version of Kyari.
So, the president himself, the minister of state, Sen. Heineken Lokpobiri, and many of the people who are involved in the supervision of Mr. Ojulari should give him a break and should allow him to use his corporate judgment to make best decisions.
In the next one month, this government will be two years in office. How would you assess it in terms of security and economy?
The stomach of the people and the tension on their faces will not show that. The number of young people who have no employment will not show that. The parlous state of infrastructure will not show that. The fact that our currency is highly depreciated and devalued will not show that. The higher debt will not show that. So, let’s just say, they are beginning. They just spent two years trying to settle down.
I don’t know what you want to do with the Minister of Finance and Minister of Budget and Planning because they’ve done two budgets. I don’t like any of the two budgets and they had to suffer the same problem. Their budget performance last year was two parlous. They are in the mid-20s in their performance of the budget. So, if you have 20-something percent performance of your budget, it means that, at best, you deliver 20-something percent of the promises you made.
So, essentially, seven and half of 10 promises you made failed. So, that is not a good start. But, I have advised them, and I’ll keep advising them, two years is enough to make a difference. The next two years, we’ll be fighting them because we’ll be competing for the same position again from next year. But, I plead with them to try to have compassion and to repurpose at least 10 percent of their budget towards direct intervention in the areas of employment, to do quick things, things that if you start you can get results in 180 days, to start working with employment, start dealing with reducing cost of food and essential commodities, and to do something about public transportation.
The CNG which they started, is in the right direction, but they are very slow about it. They don’t have all the time in the world. They may not have more than four years. They should not be deceived. There is no guarantee of a second term. I’m even working to make sure you don’t get a second term, and I’m still here. So, there are many people like me, trying to make sure you don’t get a second term. So, they should make a good opportunity of these four years that they have. They’ve used about half of it. It is not irredeemable. I believe that there are people in the government, for example, if we look at what the FCT Minister has done, it shows that in this government, it is possible to get something done. And the one in interior, some of the changes he’s made, I hope that the blue economy people follow that. The minister of works, I think he’s poorly served in terms of how much money is made available for him to do his works.
But he should be more creative. He should find a way to manage that and dwell into getting private capital in the country. There’s a lot of private capital in people’s hand in Nigeria to try to raise funds for infrastructure. If they do that, they will be able to help with the number. And the fact that they want to start adjusting the basis for calculating inflation, well, you can do that. But, rebasing the inflation database is not going to change the actual reality on the street. So, why don’t you combine that with doing something on the street? And I want you to understand that life is extremely hard for the average person in Nigeria.
The president needs the average person in Nigeria for the amount of productivity that’s going to raise the GDP, and make the economy competitive.
Some of you are working not to allow President Tinubu and the APC to return to office in 2027. But those in the APC believe that in today’s Nigeria’s politics, there isn’t anyone that can stop Tinubu from returning to power in 2027. How are you planning to achieve your dream of stopping him and the APC in 2027?
First is to engage with them, to make sure that they know that we love the country. We are not against them as persons, but we are against their policies. And to take these policies one by one and to ensure that we expose these policies and the weaknesses of these policies to the Nigerian people. It is in the interest of Nigerians, in the interest of even the APC members, because there are millions of them who are suffering as well as the rest of Nigerians. Because once you leave your party headquarters, and you go into the taxi or Uber or you go to the market, or you go to school or hospital, nobody cares about your political party anymore.
What this government has done is to mismanage economic opportunities, and to exacerbate problems they met on the ground. So, what we are trying to do now is to let Nigerians know that even though the government has failed so far, it doesn’t have to fail in the next two years. We can put them on their toes. But, should they fail, as they are determined to fail, because they are not changing policies, we have better policies to convince Nigerians that we are going to be compassionate, we are going to pay attention to the basis of the economy, we are going to ensure that public sector officials are not doing private businesses, that they are focusing on public sector delivery, and that where Tinubu has produced about two or three ministers that are doing very well, in our own case, all of them will do better than even the best of them now.
We will take that campaign and talk to the Nigerian people. And I believe that people who say that President Tinubu is unshakable, they forget about the humanity of President Tinubu, just a human being like the rest of us. No human being can say I’m unshakable, only God is unshakable. Secondly, those who said it in the past, including PDP, say we’ll do 60 years in power, they barely did 16 years. Even the National Security Adviser today was on the side of President Goodluck Jonathan and he said that an incumbent president could never be beaten. The same Nuhu Ribadu is probably one of those who are still saying now that President Tinubu is unshakable. But the day the new government is being sworn in, President Tinubu going back to Lagos these people are going to say the next government will be irreplaceable. What is clear is that the only reason, the only possibility that can make us not to defeat Tinubu in 2027 is if he does his job now because Nigerian people are not looking at my face, they’re not looking at his face they’re looking at the faces of their children, hungry for food, and unemployed.
On what platform would you be using, is it SDP and with a lot of people who are joining your party, do you even stand a chance of getting the ticket?
Getting the ticket depends on the SDP members. They know me. People are joining my party, and we are welcoming them. You can see how active I am in welcoming them. The only little issue we have with some of them is to change the culture of where they are coming from. If you have not been in an environment where there are rules or where rules are taken seriously, you need to get used to such an environment. Some of them are doing some Boy Scouts, black market operations. We are dealing with that. But, we welcome them into the party.
We believe that their coming will strengthen the party. I am not at all perturbed that these names that you have mentioned like Nasir El-Rufai, Vice President Atiku Abubakar and other people are coming. In fact, I was told that even Governor Peter Obi is coming. A lot of people are coming. We welcome them. We don’t have a problem.
Is Peter Obi joining SDP?
Supposedly so and until somebody joins, we don’t know. But his people are coming. My National Secretary has also informed me that they are talking. They are coming. I say welcome everybody. So when we come in, and we don’t become a tower of Babel, if we come in, we follow the rules, and we allow one person to emerge transparently, clearly, without cheating, without criminality, without all sorts of things that Nigerians would say, oh my God, these same people have become these other type of people as well.
The way we did our convention in 2022, the people applauded us transparently, no court case, no crisis and no allegations. If they can change our culture, and they don’t have to fear that, oh, if I don’t cheat, I can’t win. If I don’t bribe, I can’t win. If they follow the way we do in SDP, and we produce a good alternative to Nigerian, and the Nigerians see we are going to manifestly defeat APC and retire President Tinubu to Lagos or wherever he chooses in Nigeria, and we are going to start taking care of Nigerian people for day one.
Does the SDP have that kind of structure?
Yes, you can say we are structure-less, but we rely on Nigerian people. We don’t have any structure based on criminality, structure based on bribery or diversion of public funds. We rely on the structure based on the people, and the people who are working hardest for the SDP to come to power are APC because they have turned the furnace fire on the back of the Nigerian people. They are making Nigerian people suffer to get paid and when they get the pay, it cannot buy them food. They are making life tough and they are making decisions that do not favour the people.
They are spending trillions on projects that are invisible. So, people are driving on roads that are not paved but they are building roads by the side and nobody can see the roads. We have a N55 trillion budget that doesn’t trickle down to the people. So, President Tinubu is working hard for us to come to power and defeat him. He is working hard to see that he will be the last APC president. So, they are working hard in that regard because they are not taking care of the people.
With the inability to form a credible coalition, don’t you think it will be very difficult to defeat Tinubu in 2027?
It is difficult but not impossible and we are not letting our cat out of the bag yet. What we are saying is this, the fact that there are many people wanting to be president, I want to be president and everybody knows that, Vice President Atiku Abubakar wants to be president, Peter Obi wants to be president and there are other people who want to be president who are not talking that doesn’t make any difference. What makes a difference is that all of you if you are in the same framework and if the framework is firm and reasonable and decisive and at the end of the exercise, everybody comes together to pull behind the flag bearer.
