Due to the condition of then-President Yar Adua, proper supervision and attention were lacking because of his health, leading to the development of a Gas master plan but no execution.

By January 2009, the ministry was restructured, and the Minister of Power was given a separate portfolio, while the Ministry of Petroleum was restored.

Late Dr. Lukman took over the Ministry of Petroleum, and from that moment, the Gas master plan became another orphan. We had a setback with that policy. Within 15 months, late Yar Adua died, and the ministry again changed leadership.

With these two ministers now, history would repeat itself because President Tinubu has so much on his plate that he made himself minister of petroleum. I thought he was going to appoint his S.A energy either as a full minister or something else.

Once you have this structural problem in the industry, it’s always difficult to get results; it happens to power too. There are too many overlapping functions and agencies, and oil and gas also have problems, even though the new petroleum act tried to address it.

You said you were expecting the president to have brought in his special assistant on energy as possibly  the minister of petroleum or possibly as a group executive officer of NNPC. Are you saying the current structure of the Petroleum resources would not deliver results in the long run?
I have nothing against the current head of NNPC or the regulating bodies. This new government spoke about reform, but can the people in charge for the past eight years who have been running a socialist state reform themselves? I assumed President Tinubu would infuse new agility into the industry, perhaps cutting costs and bureaucracy.

You don’t need to go all over the world advertising anything if you organize yourself properly. It’s not about sacking; I have nothing against the individuals. I’m talking about restructuring and reassessing your situation in the last eight years, which has not been productive.

We’ve seen NNPC sourcing for Human Resources all over the world. They hired Huub Stokman recently, brought people from NLNG and sacked a number of managers. Was this the right thing to do?
For me, all these actions are just window dressing; they’re all political because the core issue is that the industry is dying, and the type of agility and deep reform needed cannot be achieved like this.

We need an independent body. The president knows what to do; maybe he’s under political pressure not to take certain decisions. NNPC, as a corporation, NNPC Limited by CAC doesn’t even have a board now; where’s the compliance with the law?
What is required is for a third party, like the VP, to dissect the status of NNPC as a corporation and NNPC as a limited liability company and then reconfigure the whole issue. If possible, you advertise all the key positions internationally, hire companies and recruit internationally. That way, international companies would respect what you’re doing.

NNPC Limited is sitting on so many idle assets; they can’t attract investments today because the structure is political. I expect the president to take this decision as a necessity and decouple it from politics if results are needed.

The seeds not planted today in the oil and gas industry cannot be harvested in three years because the education required in oil and gas is a minimum of three years. The crisis in the oil and gas sector also affects electricity.

We have 80 per cent of our electricity plants being gas-fired, with just a few hydro plants. This means we need gas to fire these gas power plants.

The floating of the Naira has changed many metrics in the industry; gas used to be bought at N440 per $1, then the Naira was floated. How will this affect the power sector in terms of accessing gas for power plants?
If there is no sufficient and adequate investment in the upstream oil and gas exploration production, there will not be a steady supply of gas to the power plants. The production output of all the power plants put together should be around 10,000 by now. If there is no sufficient gas and adequacy of supply, there is no sustainability of supply and good quality; how can they produce electricity?

If you allow the upstream industry to be properly organized and managed, you’ll see investment flowing. There would be a large volume of gas production, and there would be an economy of scale advantage to give gas to power plants, which could be prioritized in allocation.

You can enjoy a good price by MBTU, which can be very reasonable. I still believe that if we mass-produce gas in the country, we could still sell it below $2 to the electricity sector because of the economy of scale. It’s what you use the electricity to produce that matters.

Electricity for social commodity or electricity as an economic commodity? As a social commodity, I don’t think we can do more than 20 per cent for now. 80 per cent of our electricity must go to economic goods production, but as long as it’s 80 per cent for domestic consumption, the industry will never grow because investment and backward integration theory would also be low because there are no incentives.

Nigeria has several refineries coming up, like the one in Akwa Ibom, and Dangote has completed that of Lagos. We also have a number of modular refineries trying to build. We have people who have gas projects too. Most of these projects are not taking off and can’t find adequate field stock of crude oil and gas. What’s your take if we have to import crude oil because of our refineries?
We have land, good ones, but do we have sufficient yellow corn to give to the feed millers to produce enough to give to the animals in Nigeria? The answer is No, because we didn’t invest in  our land to produce what the land can yield. So now we’re having to import yellow corn and soybeans from whoever is producing competitively. It’s about the economy of scale.

Nigeria has a comparative advantage because we have hydrocarbon endowment. There are huge oil and gas reserves, but no investment to bring them out; therefore, there will not be sufficient crude oil to feed local refineries if they work. If the availability of crude is going to be a problem for Dangote, the global market presents itself for him. Go to wherever there’s crude in the world and buy competitively (Russia, Saudi Arabia, Angola) to feed into his refineries.

Even the government-owned refineries, if at all, the rehabilitation is completed successfully. Unless President Tinubu immediately privatizes them, as long as government civil servants run those companies, they may not get sufficient crude to feed into them. They won’t run the refineries properly because of bureaucracy and administrative bottlenecks.

There are backlog obligations of crude supply to buy from people you borrowed money from, and your production capacity is still below 1.5 million barrels per day.

In the next three years, the short run in the oil and gas industry is three years, midterm is 3 -6 years, and the long term starts from seven years above in the oil and gas industry. This is because, before you can pull the resources together – money, technology, brain, and the likes – you need a minimum of three years.

Even if you want to accelerate crude oil production in the country today, you need to call all the stakeholders, local operators, and international operators and discuss their investment timetable with them and remove all the bottlenecks to allow them to remobilize.

You must give them some incentives, get local communities in all the offshore assets and shallow waters to buy into those skills. If you start that today, you’re looking at three years’ time before you start getting results.

During these three years, you must supervise and superintend the activities of everyone who signed into this dispassionately. If not, there will be no crude.

If we can import crude competitively, there is no shame in that. The global economic state dictates that what you can’t do, you look for someone who can and buy it.

The media must help publish this situation in the proper perspective so that the orthodox thinking of the fact that we have oil and land so we’re not supposed to be importing rice and yellow corn and crude oil is corrected.

Yes, naturally, we’re not supposed to, but we didn’t build the capacity to produce competitively.

Are you in support of the people calling for the merger of the two regulatory bodies we currently have in the petroleum industry? And also, what is your take on the implementation of the petroleum industry act?
The two regulatory bodies ought to be just one. The political interference in the petroleum industry act’s original draft under President Buhari is what led to the two bodies.

The hydrocarbon regulatory commission of Nigeria is supposed to have one commission. In that commission, you can have a commissioner in charge of Gas, a Commissioner in charge of Oil, and a Commissioner in charge of Refinery, but it should be under one body. The creation of these bureaucratic institutions doing no work other than massaging paper doesn’t contribute anything to the domestic economy of the country.
The merger is long overdue; it should have been merged by now and reorganized the commission properly.

There’s a lot of work for the president to do, but until I see the core team he’s going to put together to do this work, four months have gone, and we’re yet to see anything so far.

There are no clear definitions of roles and functions for some ministers so far, as some are overlapping. He needs a core team that will drive his reform and vision and agenda.

 The power sector will be 10 years old this month. Most of the power entities, particularly the discos, have not made a profit since they were set up 10 years ago. What is your take on the DisCos?
The power sector privatization is only two years old; in 2015, when President Buhari came in, they stopped the entire reform. They brought a socialist philosophy into it and crippled the investors and the industry. Power privatization is not ten years old; power privatization was carried out ten years ago, but eight years of that were wasted. The then-government deliberately crippled the investors and the industry.

If Nigerians are realists like we believe we are, what additional value was added to the electricity industry in the last eight years?
I’m stating that privatization is only two years old because the first two years of privatization, the industry was in the hands of private sectors.
Then Buhari’s socialist regime came in with bad blood, political vendetta, and the like, and it seized the growth of the industry and crippled the investors. The people who invested their money between 2013 and 2015 have not settled down in the business acquired when the new government came in with all sorts of negative propaganda and misconceptions and destroyed the industry.
Tinubu has to try to clean up the industry and give Nigeria electricity.