Nigeria moved an average of about sixty one million litres of petrol every day in 2021, a figure regulators reported was climbing month on month. Behind that headline number lies a logistical feat of staggering scale, and a quieter problem that has cost the country dearly for decades: a large share of the product that leaves the depots never fully reconciles with what arrives at the pumps.

Abbey Ngochindo, a downstream petroleum and logistics specialist whose name has become associated with closing that gap, argues the losses are not inevitable. They are, he says, a failure of information.

Ngochindo has spent his career inside the machinery of that distribution system. As a supply chain manager he has overseen operations at government owned depots across eight states, from Ejigbo in Lagos and Mosimi in Ogun to Kaduna, Gusau in Zamfara, Port Harcourt in Rivers and Warri in Delta.

In earlier roles he handled the programming, batching, loading and distribution of about forty trucks a day, carrying product worth in the region of four hundred and eighty million naira. At that scale, he points out, a discrepancy of even one per cent is a fortune.

“Every party in the chain had a piece of the truth, but nobody had the whole picture at the same moment,” Ngochindo explains. “The depot knew what it loaded. The transporter knew where the truck was. The retail outlet knew what it received. The trouble was that these three facts never met until it was too late to act on them. By then the litres were already gone.”

His response was a three way communication framework linking depot operators, transporters and retail outlet managers in close to real time. Each delivery became visible to all three parties from the moment a truck was loaded to the moment its contents were confirmed at the pump. Discrepancies that once surfaced weeks later, buried in reconciliation reports, now announced themselves within hours.

“When everyone can see the same numbers at the same time, the temptation to massage any single figure simply disappears,” he says. “You do not need to accuse anyone. You make the information visible, and the behaviour corrects itself. That is the quiet power of transparency, and it costs far less than people imagine.”

The principle has a track record in his own hands. During his earlier years in the sector, Ngochindo developed and implemented a digital records and archiving system that cut the turnaround time on change requests by roughly thirty per cent. In an environment where a single approval could otherwise sit untouched for weeks, the gain was not cosmetic. Decisions that once stalled began to move, and documents that once vanished stayed found.

He is impatient with the long held assumption that serious technology belongs only to the multinational oil majors. “We told ourselves that the tools were for the big foreign companies and that we would manage with experience and goodwill,” he says. “That was a costly story to believe. The tools are within reach. What has been missing is the will to understand our own processes well enough to apply them properly.”

That insistence on understanding the ground reality before reaching for software sets Ngochindo apart. He is fluent in the operational detail of tank farms, truck loading and product programming, yet he speaks just as comfortably about data and digital workflows.

“The mistake people make is to buy a system and expect it to solve their problems,” he says. “A system only works if it reflects how the business actually runs. Otherwise you have simply digitised your confusion.”

He now runs a chain of two service stations that handle about one hundred and fifty thousand litres of product a day, a vantage point that has only sharpened his conviction. He sees concrete, near term opportunities across the sector: predictive systems that anticipate demand at individual outlets, automated alerts that flag unusual loading patterns, and shared platforms that bind the whole chain together. None of it, he insists, is futuristic.

The lesson, he argues, travels well beyond petroleum. Any sector that moves physical goods across long distances, from food and pharmaceuticals to construction materials, suffers from the same blind spots that once plagued fuel distribution, and stands to gain from the same discipline of shared visibility.

“The future of distribution in this country is not more trucks or bigger depots,” Ngochindo concludes. “It is better information, available to the right people at the right time. Whoever masters that will move the goods. Everyone else will be left counting their losses, and wondering where the litres went.”