Niyi Awodeyi is an oil and gas expert. He has been involved in policy formulation for the oil and gas sector in Nigeria, working as a consultant in the pipelines and associated assets commercialisation drive, crude oil theft prevention committee and other associated initiatives geared towards improving the sector in Nigeria. He has also been involved in various conferences and seminars targeted at promoting and improving the Federal Government gas production, transportation and utilisation initiatives, working in consonance to support the Decade of Gas Initiative as led by the Minister of State for Petroleum (Gas), Ekperike Ekpo and ably coordinated by the Director of the initiative, Mr Ed Ubong. In this interview, he insists gas is the future to cleaner and cheaper energy sources especially as Nigeria has an abundance of untapped gas resources. He spoke to GREGORY AUSTIN NWAKUNOR.
Background
I was born and brought up in Benin City, Edo State. My father is from Ondo while my mum is from Edo State, Benin, to be precise, from the Obaseki family. I had my early education in Benin City, and then, my secondary school training was at the Federal Government College, Idoani, Ondo State. I went to the University of Ibadan, did my youth service programme in Warri, Delta State. I was initially posted to Bayelsa. We were the first set of Corps members posted to that state. But I redeployed to Delta, because I needed to serve in an oil and gas firm. The only oil and gas firm in Bayelsa then was Agip, it was in Brass Town. So, I kind of redeployed to Shell in Warri. I did my youth service in Shell, Warri. I thought I was going to be retained. I was almost retained, but the intriguing thing about ethnicity made me lose that job.
Immediately after youth service, I was doing timber work. I was cutting timber from Ondo State, and supplying to an Italian exporter. I made quite a decent amount of money. So, I just stopped looking for a job. That was around 1998 and 1999. I did some real estate construction work, contracting with the Federal Government, and then Shell called for their Shell Intensive Training Programme (SITP). It was a programme that they would take graduates from Nigeria, train them to their standard, and then employ some of them. So we did that, and I got Shell employment to be a Shell staff. Days later, Schlumberger gave me employment to be an international staff. So I rejected Shell.
Was there any compensation to Shell for giving you that training?
No, it wasn’t compulsory for them to employ me. After the training, you would still go through the Shell interview. You still have to pass that interview before you’re employed.
So, let us look at your career trajectory
Anyway, I joined Schlumberger because I was still a young man in my 20s, and a company was offering to pay me thousands of dollars monthly. Of course, I took their offer, and I was transferred to France. I was in France for about a month. Then from France, they sent me to Gabon to start working. I actually signed my contract to work for Schlumberger in France.
I worked in Gabon for about three and-a-half years for Schlumberger. Then I was transferred from Gabon to Equatorial Guinea. I did two and-a-half years in Equatorial Guinea. I was transferred back to Gabon as location manager to manage the business in Gabon. I did that for another two years. Then I was transferred to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. I was there for about a year. From Abu Dhabi, I was transferred to China. I was in China for another two and a half years. My whole career, I never worked in Nigeria for Schlumberger. It was only when I was about to leave Schlumberger in 2015 that I came back for just four months, and I left after the four months. So my 14 years working for Schlumberger was international. I was all abroad. I’ve only worked for one company my whole life. That’s Schlumberger. The minute I left Schlumberger, I started my own businesses. I started about two companies the same year, Shortcrest and Subterra. Then three years later, I opened my third company, Corral. Shortcrest and Subterra are into oil and gas services.
I and my company have been involved in promoting and actualising the Federal Government’s decade of gas initiative. We have done and are currently actively involved in the gas distribution sector via construction and maintenance of gas infrastructure assets such as pipelines and other above ground facilities for clients like Shell Nigeria Gas, Nigerian Gas and Marketing Ltd to name a few. We do interventions and geo-technical services. Corral is into logistics, real estate, and general contracting. So that’s what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years.
For me, it’s more about giving back, because whenever you look at it, Nigeria made me what I am today. That’s the way I see it… Because in UI, how much were we paying for education? How much were we paying as school fees? We didn’t pay. Then the Shell Training School, it was still Nigeria. We got world-class training. I got an international degree from that course because SITP is a one-year programme. They house you. They feed you. They pay you for the one year. The programme was intensive. We started off with about 170 trainees and ended up with maybe 120. Every three months, they weeded out the bottom 30 per cent. So, it was really intensive. We were doing four post-graduate level examinations every Saturday for one year. So you can imagine the pressure. People broke down. People quit. As in, I can’t do this. So that’s where we went. So they trained me. Nigeria trained me.
I have tried to maintain the kind of standards I got with Schlumberger, with my companies. We’ve won a lot of awards. One of the recent ones was from Shell, because we work for Shell. It is about employee engagement. We’ve been working for 10 years. We’ve never owed salary of our employees. When COVID-19 happened, those two years, everywhere was shut down. We had zero revenues. Did I lay off any staff? No. I didn’t lay off any staff. I was paying from savings. But we cut salaries to 50 per cent.
When you have a business, you plan properly. You know money doesn’t come in every day, so you keep some monies aside, which is going to be company’s profit. But to keep your staff, to make them know that you are loyal to them, you do that. We’ve never had an employee in 10 years that resigned from us. Of course, we’ve fired some people for one thing or the other. But to say an employee would resign, we’ve never had it.
When we make a good profit in a year, we take a percentage of company profit and share among the staff based on your seniority. That’s what Schlumberger gave to me.
When we look at market value, like this year now, we’ve increased salaries without employees asking us to.
Looking at the Nigerian oil and gas sector, what do you think should make it that which you desire?
As somebody who has had international experience and has international standards, I think the first thing that we need to handle is transparency. We need to be open about what we want to do. Be open about what we are doing. And be open to taking criticism. If we can get those three, things will get better.
They say we don’t have a maintenance culture in Nigeria. I was going to say that. You build the best things, you build the greatest things, and you build the best infrastructure in Nigeria. Come back in two years, it’s gone. It’s gone, because we don’t have a mindset of continuous improvement. We just finish a project onto the next. Nobody’s coming back to say, how is that one doing? Then when you come back, anybody that talks about how that one is going on, the person that builds it sees that criticism as an affront to their personality. No. Criticisms are not attacks. The average Nigerian sees criticism as an attack. And what happens when you are attacked? You want to defend. You won’t take the lesson. You won’t take what they are saying. You won’t listen. So if you are not listening, then how do you repair it? How do you make it better? Those are the issues.
The disturbing state of Federal Government’s refineries not working and why they should be declassified
Why would they work? Were they not working before? In the 80s, the early stages, they worked. But for close to two decades now, they’ve not worked. So, the question is, why are they not working? Okay, maybe. For me, refineries are not working because the people importing don’t want them to work. Why would you want to import when you have refineries to do: Because they’re making money from importing. If you want refineries to work, government should have no business in imports or remove crude, remove petroleum products from national list of critical assets. Declassify refineries.
All government has to do is to make sure the quality coming in meets standard. Be very strict with quality of products coming in. If your product doesn’t make it at the port, take it back. By the time you lose money twice taking it back, you make sure the product hits the right value. So those guys importing are the ones, honestly causing problems.
Do I support subsidy removal? I’m 100 per cent in support. We were losing on two folds. First fold is that as long as you keep importing and subsidising, your refineries will never work. If your refineries are not working, you’re losing out on a lot of ecosystem. Imagine all our refineries working. Do you know how many jobs in Nigeria that would be created? Dangote has created over 60,000 jobs, directly and indirectly with his refinery. So if all the refineries are working, do you know how many thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people are going to be employed? But it will not work because we are importing. We are creating jobs for the people that own the refinery abroad, creating jobs for them. That’s one.
The subsidy scheme was the most massive corruption we’ve ever seen in Nigeria. Dangote just came out to say, we don’t consume more than 33 million litres of PMS a day in Nigeria. At the point subsidy was claiming it was 90 million litres a day.
Who’s losing? Me and you; because that money that they are diverting is supposed to go into education, health and other things. This was on a daily basis. What does that mean for us? It’s very cheap. Guess what? We were subsidising for Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Cameroon even up to Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, because oil was less than half the price in their own countries. So we are using Nigeria’s common wealth for the benefit of other West African countries.
Zenith Bank, GTBank, First Bank pay dividends to us on a yearly basis when they make profit. Right? If I own bank shares and, two, three years, they don’t pay me dividend, I will sell off the shares and go and buy shares somewhere else that will pay me a dividend. That’s how NNPC should be. So you will now be forced to make a profit. How are you going to make a profit? You have to work properly. You have to run the business like a business to make profit. That’s the rule. Government should take its hands off refineries. I can guarantee you if they sell Port Harcourt Refinery to a private entity, you will see it working.
However, you don’t remove two critical things at the same time. That’s what crippled us. That’s what crippled this government for two years. If he had removed subsidy and kept defending the Naira, first year, everybody adjusts. Then stop defending the Naira, second year. It would be easy.
There’s this saying that a country that is blessed with oil is at the same time cursed, most especially in this part of the world?
It all boils down to selfishness. Why are Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf states not cursed? The Gulf States are blessed with oil. Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, UAE, that’s Dubai, blessed with oil. Malaysia is blessed with oil. Indonesia is blessed with oil. Why Africa? Selfishness. We’re selfish. That’s the truth.
Whatever I’m doing today, the first thought for me, is it going to ensure sustainability of this business that we are in? Whatever decisions I am taking today regarding this oil and gas sector, how is it going to make this business sustainable in 10, 20, 30 years time? The investment we are making today will it make that business to be sustainable. How is it going to add value? Value addition, sustainable value addition is the word. Don’t just look for a project to do because you’re going to make money off contract. We say there’s corruption in Nigeria.
So because of your selfish interest, you kill the project. Then we’ll take care of ourselves. But you would expect that those guys that are tapping and breaking into pipelines, making money, are doing it for themselves. They are not taking care of their own environment.
Are they building schools with the money for their people? You understand where I’m coming from? The pipeline thieves that are stealing crude oil, are they building hospitals, schools, and things like that for their localities? No. Rather, they are building mansions for themselves. They are buying Rolls Royce and Mercedes-Benz and G-Wagons for themselves.
Yes, there’s corruption in Nigeria. But there’s corruption everywhere. The United States is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Do you know that? It’s one of the most corrupt countries in the world. But when they do projects, they are sustainable projects. It’s not just to make money. You make money and also have sustainable projects that will bring value to everybody. If you bring a project that is going to bring value, people will look at your project and they’re like, what am I going to gain from it? If there’s no way they can gain from it, they’ll kill that project. But will the project bring value to the whole, to the entirety? So because of your selfish interest, you kill the project. Why?
What would you say will help Nigeria to withstand the challenge of climate change and the call for renewable?
So, we live in a world that we have to take care of. I have no problems with that. But you also have to look at your own situation. The people calling for climate change, how did they become great as countries? US, China, they all use fossil fuel. Their industrial growth, their industrial revolutions were all carried on the back of fossil fuels: Crude oil and coal. That’s what they used. Firewood to get coal, that’s what they used.
So you’ve become great.
Now, you’re asking me to do renewable. I have no problem with renewable. But what is the reality for my own growth? If I go with your talk on climate change, my growth will decelerate. Then you’ll still be my God, because I have to rely on you all the time. So there should be a mix where we can go renewable. But when it comes to heavy industrialisation, I’m sorry. We have to continue where we are until we get to where they are. Am I saying we keep being irresponsible with fossil fuel? There are cleaner alternatives. For instance, I’m a very big proponent of natural gas usage instead of diesel.
I work with the initiative, the natural gas initiative. What we do for sure is to build natural gas pipelines. I’m a big proponent. In fact, I work more in the natural gas space because it’s cleaner than petrol, to burn gas, cleaner than diesel.
In North Africa, for instance, now there are so many companies that are converting from diesel generators to gas power generators. They are the ones we are building pipelines for. We just got a call from Ghana now and we are looking at how we can help them build from natural gas infrastructure in Ghana.
That’s what we’ve been working on for the past few weeks. So I’m big on natural gas. Natural gas is climate friendly. It’s not 100 per cent climate compliant, but it’s better. It cuts your emissions down with almost 70 per cent. So that’s why I’m big on it.
So we need it to get to a third of where these developed countries who are doing COP, COP20, saying we should all stop, COP30 exactly, they are now saying that we should stop fossil fuel usage. You used it to become great. What are the alternatives for us? If we stop it, then we stagnate.
We have to industrialise, we have to make life, but we will look for more responsible alternatives, which is natural gas. For our industries, we can go electric vehicles. I use electric vehicles a lot.
We don’t have that laxity to carry our industries with that amount of renewable. China can create renewable solar farms. Norway can create windmill offshore and onshore to power themselves. They got to where they are. They made all that money to invest from fossil fuels. We don’t have that. So the alternative for me is, we are not going to go 100 per cent renewable. We can’t afford it.
We will die. So allow us to use our natural gas while we are scaling back on diesel. Diesel is the dirtiest of them all. So scale back on diesel, go on natural gas, scale back on PMS usage, go on CNG and electric vehicles. By the way, you want to go electric vehicles, you need to generate electricity. Do we even have enough electricity to power our homes on top of vehicles? We have to be realistic.
So, if you have an opportunity to design a workable philosophy for the Nigerian living. What will you look out for that should drive Nigerians, should make Nigerians move forward?
But I have a recommendation where Nigeria, as a country, is losing it. Our mistake is in the way we educate our children from age three to seven. The curriculum, like I said, I’ve lived for years in over 12 different countries. And I’ve come to realise that the successful countries are those that their education are centred between age three to seven. What do they teach? They don’t focus on one plus one, ABC. They focus on character development of the children. They teach them primarily empathy. They teach them primarily the spirit of sharing. They teach them primarily care for the next person and the environment, because at that age is when the core character of every human being crystallises. So whatever you crystallise upon, you build going forward.
In Nigeria, we start teaching one plus one, two, two plus two, four, four plus four, eight, at age three, four. Do you know what one plus one, two, two plus two, four, eight, means? Four plus four, eight teaches the child. It makes competing their core. We start giving positions. Who came first in your kindergarten? I came first. Me. The child that came last sees himself as useless. Then he will do anything.
Mark that word. He will do what? He or she will do anything. Do not be last.
That’s where the cheating mindset comes from. You are not building to the strength of the child. You are teaching this child to be strong in a particular way. That’s where we miss it. We only value success in a certain light. Meanwhile, over there, they teach you to be a human being first, before they now look at teaching you other things.
One thing that is very common with Nigerians… Do you not see your mates? We are so fond of saying; do you not see your mates? Very unhealthy competition is what we engender.
So, we need to fix that bandwidth, that educational bandwidth. We need to fix it. Teach the children empathy. Change their mindset. What does that say about our ethics? We don’t have ethics. As a people, we don’t have ethics. So, because we don’t have ethics, it’s not going to change. So we need to change that mindset at that age. That’s the first one. If we are able to change that, every other thing will be easy. Because right now, whatever I will say, you’re building in an already faulty foundation. You’re already building a faulty foundation because you cannot make people see the corollaries of what they are doing to the effects. They can’t see it.
Your driving force
I gave you a list of so many things, so many people that are dependent on me. So that’s one of my biggest driving forces, my biggest fear. I can’t let them down. I can’t let them down. My employees who have families, I can’t let them down. I have to make decisions that will make sure the company keeps thriving and paying their salaries. That’s what drives me. Not vanity or vainglory. We will all go some day.
We have orphanages that we support on a monthly basis. We used to give them food, a bag of rice, Indomie noodles, and things like that. But we got feedback from whistleblowers that some of the staff of these orphanages appropriated food. I cannot go to there and say, is this happening? But I thought about, what’s a better way to make life easy?
Every school year, we buy them books. Notebooks. Every child gets at least six to 10 notebooks. We just print with company logos on it so that we can track. I have to follow up on that. It’s my office admin people who send teachers to the orphanage every evening to teach the children. We pay directly. Last time I was there, I told the kids the best graduating students we will pay their university fees. Any university you get into, best graduating students, you do your job, you get admission, Subterra will pay. Things like this give me joy.
