"$3bn refinery fraud: N80bn found in sacked MD's account" - Report, May 3, 2025
There is probably no adult Nigerian alive who was shocked or surprised by the news report. It was a tragedy waiting to unfold.
That the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, would be probed was never in doubt. The question was not if; but when a President would be patriotic enough to probe the Corporation. If the initial reports turn out to be true, finding N80 billion in various accounts of just one Managing Director portends the biggest scandal in the nation's history; and one that would to some extent explain why Nigerians are poorer today than in 1960.
Our Presidents, without exception, have appointed alley cats to manage our fish shop - so to speak. It is quite possible that if a honest probe of the NNPC were conducted, none of its former GMDs will go un-indicted. NNPC stank so much; people standing outside its corporate headquarters in Abuja hold their noses. However, the Chief Executive Officers, Chairman and Directors were not the only culprits.
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Since 1999, they have had three powerful accomplices; Ministers of Petroleum Resources - Presidents Obasanjo, Buhari and Tinubu - who knew that virtually all Nigeria's economic "eggs" were in the basket named NNPC.
Yet they failed to take good care of the national interest.
Reading the Annual Reports of the Auditor General of the Federation, AuGF, for three years running, one is scandalised to discover that the two most queried organs of government were the Central Bank of Nigeria and NNPCL. The queries invariably went unanswered by the Governor of CBN and the GMD-NNPC (L). On no single occasion did the President of Nigeria step in to insist that the query be answered. Obviously, the Presidents became accomplices, before or after, in whatever great crimes might have been committed.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, is also not totally blameless. One would have thought the anti-crime commission would have taken pre-emptive action by taking notice of the queries which went unanswered. Several of those queries were very direct in their accusation of malfeasance by top officials in the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs. As it is now, even the most pain-staking probe of the NNPCL would be akin to kicking a ball down a slope and running to retrieve it. A lot of the money discovered stolen has already vanished into crypto wallets and Dubai; never to be recovered.
The ultimate gainers will be those expensive Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SANs, ready to collect briefs from the accused. After all, it has been said that, "And whether you're an honest man; and whether you're a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief" (Sir William Gilbert, 1836-1911).
If all else fails, plea bargains will ensure the kleptomaniacs keep the bulk of their loot and return only the barest minimum to the country. The Judiciary will assist as usual. Furthermore, there is always a political solution available. Each of the accused who is not already a card-carrying member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, can go and join the party and claim the immunity guaranteed by membership. The EFCC Chairman can boast; but, politics will trump justice any day. We would not be in the mess of wasting $897 million (N1.4 trillion) on Warri refinery which should have been scrapped years ago - if we had patriotic Presidents. The pattern is always the same. Mele Kyari assured Tinubu that the refineries would be pumping fuel by December 2023. The new President, seeking a quick result, fell for it and authorised $2bn investment. Today, Nigeria has no fuel from the refineries and $2bn (N3 trillion) is gone. I said so in 2023.
Below are excerpts from an article written in 2018, when Buhari prioritised ethnicity over competence and character in making one of the most important appointments of his government.
NNPC refineries as a metaphor for all that is wrong with Nigeria
"Refineries lose N96bn in nine months, says NNPC," News Report.
The story published in a national newspaper on December 30, 2018 elaborated by pointing out that "The Federal Government-owned refineries lost N96.34bn in the first nine months of this year compared to N95.09bn in the whole of 2017." Certainly, unless things have changed in the last quarter of 2018, the refineries alone would have thrown about N132bn down the drain by the time you are reading this article. It is not exactly the best beginning to what we should collectively expect to be a prosperous new year. But, for those knowledgeable about the NNPC and especially, the four refineries located in Kaduna, Port Harcourt (2) and Warri, the results were not unexpected. Quite the contrary, they were predictable. Even under more competent Federal Governments in the past, the refineries were notorious pipes of corruption draining national cash into the pockets of those close to the corridors of power in Abuja. They remain so till today. Part of the hidden agenda embedded in the lopsided appointment of Northerners into the operations of the NNPC group was to consolidate the vice grip of the cabal now in government - with the refineries as focal points. And, if anybody wants to know why the Petroleum Industrialisation Bill, PIB, will never see the light of day as long as Buhari is President, they only have to get close to the way the FG manages the refineries. NNPC is not run as a business, but, more like a racket. It has always been. The refineries were deliberately crippled to ensure they could not process anything close to their 450,000 barrels of crude oil per day right from the time Abacha acquired 30 per cent interest in the West African refinery, which was confiscated by General Abubakar on May 28, 1999 in a little-known decree. Abacha opened the eyes of his successors to the opportunity for corrupt self-enrichment via the issuance of fuel import licences to a selected few officers. I was shocked to the marrows when on a visit to the officer handling such import licences during YarÁdua's regime a call came through to him from a former Head of State wanting to know when he could send his staff to pick up his own import documents which would later enable him, not only to make huge profits at face value of the contract, but to later collect "subsidies". So much for CGFR!
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When Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784, declared that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel" (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, p 182) I thought the iconoclast had gone too far. A few weeks after our former national leader collected his loot, "Fellow Nigerians" published adverts on his birthday praising him as a "patriot"!!
"Every great enterprise starts off with enthusiasm for an exalted aim and ends up bogged down in petty politics." Charles Peguy, 1873-1914.
If ever there was an enterprise which started off with a great deal of enthusiasm and hope, it must be the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, which was created by Decree 33 on April 21, 1977 by Military Head of State, Olusegun Obasanjo. The NNPC did not wait long to be enmeshed in petty politics and corruption. Indeed, the NNPC had always been that way. It is difficult to pin-point when the group and the refineries abandoned the business of making money for Nigeria and embarked on milking the fatherland for a few people."
