Anyone who has dared to pay more than a scant attention to the latest rumblings – within and without – in the national oil corporation in the past few weeks must have come to the same verdict that nothing good can ever come out of the behemoth. Exactly three weeks ago, this columnist had written about the not-exactly-shocking announcement by the NNPCL-GMD Bayo Ojulari, in faraway Austria on the company’s plan to sell the Port Harcourt refinery.
That was coming two months after the refinery was shut down for ‘maintenance’ and this also coming six months after its well-publicised re-start which at the time was celebrated far and wide. Never mind that the country had expended a whopping $1.5 billion of Nigeria’s hard-to-get forex to get it to that point, just like the typical Nigerian puzzle, what informed the piece and the barely suppressed outrage, wasn’t so much about the huge amount spent on the turnaround, but the grave potential scams insinuated.
First was the reported arrest of a former Chief Financial Officer of the NNPC, Umar Isa and the former Managing Director of the Warri Refinery, Jimoh Olasunkanmi. The duo was reported to be under EFCC investigation over an alleged $7.2bn fraud linked to the rehabilitation of the three refineries in Kaduna, Warri, and Port Harcourt. The second which followed, and which this columnist actually considered graver, is the suggestion that the entire country may have been scammed!
To use Ojulari’s words: “So refineries, we made quite a lot of investment over the last several years and brought in a lot of technologies. We’ve been challenged. Some of those technologies have not worked as we expected so far. But also, as you know, when you’re refining a very old refinery that has been abandoned for some time, what we’re finding is that it’s becoming a little bit more complicated”.
Talk of a project on which the whole nation had pinned its hopes of full rehabilitation and which the country had committed a whopping $7.2 billion being declared as not only unproven, untested, but also offering no guarantees.
Now, the same Ojulari, who only a short while ago stated that “sale is not out of the question. All the options are on the table, to be frank, but that decision will be based on the outcome of the reviews we’re doing now” has since walked back on that. He says the sale of the Port Harcourt Refining Company is no longer on the table, and that the company is rather committed to ‘completing high-grade rehabilitation and retention of the plant’!
And then the caveats: “the earlier decision to operate the Port Harcourt refinery, before full completion of its rehabilitation, was ill-informed and sub commercial.
“Although progress is being made on all three, the emerging outlook calls for more advanced technical partnerships to complete and high-grade the rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt refinery. Thus, selling is highly unlikely as it would lead to further value erosion.” (My emphasis).
His simple verdict: Those that conceived, planned, and executed the Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) did a terrifically poor job. Meaning that the ‘process’ was so flawed that it would amount to grave injury to describe it as such; since the technologies (which the NNPCL-GMD has openly declared to be suspect), would require another layer of procurements and technologies to ‘upgrade’.
I suppose no one vetted the contract papers (if there were any) to fully understand what value the country is supposed to be getting in the end or are expected to be delivered by the main contractor, Tecnimont. Between March 2021 when the federal government awarded the contract for the refurbishment and modernisation of the refinery complex and its May shutdown for ‘maintenance’, we are again at a point where the refinery would require “more advanced technical partnerships” to see things through!
There have been other side-attractions going on. There is the ding-dong between Senator Aliyu Wadada-led Senate Committee on Public Accounts and the NNPCL-GMD over unresolved financial infractions said to amount to N210tn! In the wake of the serial invitations by the senate to the GMD to help clear the fog on the infractions which the latter only honoured at the pain of a sanction, the latter finally showed up at the senate chambers with a plea for more time to address the queries. A minor part of that side show is the clarification by the senate committee chair that contrary to reports suggesting “theft”, the sum flagged in audit reports was only “unaccounted for”, and not “stolen”!
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Which is why the latest twist in the tale – the rumour of the so-called ‘forced resignation’ of Ojulari by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Department of State Security – has merely added a new layer of distrust to the image of an entity where the only permanent item on the menu is bad news and more of bad news!
As it is, the company’s initials may have changed, pretty little else has changed. A little more than three years since its supposed transition into a commercial, independent entity, similar to other national oil companies worldwide, more and more Nigerians are questioning the wisdom in the mere name-plate change (from NNPC to NNPCL) as against creating an entirely brand new national oil company with its own distinct corporate culture.
Of course, the joke out there is that Nigeria is so fixated on the Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of refineries that little else matters; nothing on the sprawling depots and network of pipelines that requires urgent attention to relieve the pressure on the road infrastructure and to grow its long term competitiveness; and, no indication, as yet, of its readiness to play in the big league as one would expect of it given its immense assets.
And while the irony is lost that a terminally ill NNPCL, an entity itself in dire of TAM, is actually the one leading the charge to redirect the course of the nation’s energy transition, it manages to serve Nigerians with sufficient distractions to prevent them from asking deep, profound questions about its continuing relevance while ensuring that things remain the same!
I believe the time has come for the federal government to tear down the edifice brick by brick.
