By Olufemi Soneye
In its editorial of 2nd August, 2024, the BusinessDay newspaper, characteristically, launched another scurrilous and baseless attack on the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd). In the editorial entitled: “NNPCL: Liability or Asset to Nigerians?”, the newspaper set out to paint the picture of NNPC Ltd that is a liability to Nigeria instead of an asset that it should be. It chronicled a litany of issues which in its estimation have made the company to lose its place as an asset to the nation. As to be expected, all the issues it raised were either outright lies or unfair misrepresentation of facts. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
According to the newspaper, NNPC Ltd.’s status as an asset is undercut by the opacity of its operations and corruption. The truth, however, is that this is a regurgitation of age-long allegations that have since been overtaken by the emergence of Mr. Mele Kyari as the Group Chief Executive Officer of the company and the transition of the old NNPC as a corporation into a limited liability company under the Petroleum Industry Act.
One of the key thrusts of the Kyari-led management since 2019 has been its focus on transparency and accountability. This was what gave rise to the Transparency, Accountability and Performance Excellence (TAPE) management philosophy under which the company’s audited financial statements began to be published annually since 2019. In fact, the same BusinessDay newspaper that is so bent on hanging the tag of opacity on the company actually honoured Kyari with its “Energy Executive of the Year” award in 2021 for turning the fortunes of the company around and entrenching the culture of transparency in the company. But out of sheer mischief, the newspaper has forgotten so soon and chosen to borrow some ignoble tricks from Josef Goebbel’s playbook, that of repeating the lies of opacity and corruption against the NNPC Ltd frequently with the hope of sustaining the propaganda just so well the public would believe the lies to be the truth.
The next point made in the editorial is that of mismanagement of resources and inefficiency. In its bid to present a semblance of balance, the newspaper acknowledged the role of government interference in the company. A bulk of the legacy problems, such as the age-long lack of maintenance of the refineries, is traceable to government interference. Any old refinery staff member of the NNPC Ltd will tell you that NNPC engineers used to carry out the turn-around maintenance of the refineries until past governments started dabbling in to influence contracts for their cronies.
However, with the PIA, all that is behind as the NNPC Ltd now operates as a limited liability company under the Company and Allied Matters Act (CAMA). As is presently constituted, the company is owned by the government through the Ministry of Finance Incorporated and the Ministry of Petroleum. But the PIA envisages that in no distant time, the company will be listed on the stock exchange with shares owned by Nigerians in their individual capacities. But prior to that time, the management of the company under Kyari has instituted a management system encapsulated in the Performance Excellence element of the TAPE philosophy. Under this, the company has made great strides in moving from a position of loss in 2019 to consistent profitability. This is in spite of the fact that the company contends with monstrous odds in the form of crude oil theft and pipeline vandalism.
The fact is: companies like Saudi Aramco, with which the newspaper tried to benchmark the NNPC Ltd, do not contend with such odds that have very practical implications for crude oil production. The newspaper is only being disingenuous in blaming the nation’s suboptimal crude oil production on inefficiency in the NNPC Ltd when it is common knowledge that the security challenges are not of the company’s making. But even at that, the NNPC Ltd has not fared badly in managing the bad situation to get the results that it has been posting in the past few years. The truth is that the current reality of the NNPC Ltd, in terms of management and performance, does not reflect the picture of mismanagement and inefficiency that the BusinessDay tried to paint in its editorial. The question that arises from all this, which the BusinessDay must answer, is: do companies that have issues with mismanagement of resources and inefficiency make profits as the NNPC Ltd has consistently done in the past three years?
The other issue that has stymied the NNPC Ltd from being an asset to the nation, according to the BusinessDay, is its monopolistic control of the petroleum sector. Supporting its position, the newspapers states: “The corporation’s dominant position as the sole importer of petrol and the primary issuer of import licenses for diesel creates market distortions”. This allegation, coming from a business newspaper like the BusinessDay, is very curious. For the newspaper to state that NNPC Ltd is the “primary issuer of import licenses for diesel” shows how little it knows about the oil and gas industry. It only means that the BusinessDay either does not know the difference between an industry regulator and an operator or it just wants to take its mischief to a ridiculous level, hoping that the public would swallow its lies hook, line, and sinker.
For the avoidance of doubt, NNPC Ltd does not issue import licenses for diesel or any petroleum product for that matter. This is because, NNPC Ltd, as provided in Section 64 of the PIA, is an operator just like any other company that operates in the oil and gas sector, and not a regulator. The PIA makes provision for the establishment of two regulatory agencies in the sector. They are the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) and the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC). The newspaper actually acknowledged these two regulatory agencies in the editorial. But how it came by the idea that the NNPC Ltd issues import licenses to marketers, a clear regulatory function, is really difficult to understand. This, however, goes to show that the newspaper and its editors know very little about the subject matter of their editorial.
On the allegation that NNPC Ltd runs a monopoly in the importation of petrol, here are the facts that the BusinessDay failed to acknowledge in its editorial. When the downstream sector was deregulated on 29th May, 2023, with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s declaration that fuel subsidy was gone, every petroleum marketer was automatically empowered to import the product and sell at whatever price(s) they chose. NNPC Ltd only stepped in to close the gap as a supplier of last resort, a role assigned to it by the framers of the PIA to guarantee energy security for the nation. NNPC Ltd did not muscle any marketer out of petrol importation to become a monopoly. Besides, it does not look like the company is making any profit from being the sole importer of petrol which is usually the major objective of monopolists.
In fact, by playing this role of sole importer of petrol at this time when others are not able to import the product, NNPC Ltd has proved to be a huge asset to the nation- much more of an asset than the BusinessDay would want Nigerians and the world to believe!
Soneye, is the Chief Corporate Communications Officer, NNPC Ltd.