admin A Professor Emeritus of Petroleum Economics and Policy Research and the former Director of Energy Information Division of the LSU Centre for Energy Studies, Professor Omowumi Iledare has described the newly reconstituted board of the NNPCL as “a new wine in a new bottle.” The new board announced by President Bola Tinubu has Engineer Bayo Ojulari as the Group CEO, while Ahmadu Musa becomes the Non-Executive Chairman. 
In an exclusive interview with Crude Reports magazine, Professor Iledare said for the first time in Nigeria, “The federal government has appointed an apolitical board for the NNPCL that has an inclusive member representation from the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria. The members are thoroughly bred oil and gas professionals. They are very competent and highly distinguished personalities who had achieved excellently well within the oil and gas terrain.”
A visiting Professor of Petroleum Economics at the Institute of Petroleum Studies (IPS), University of Portharcourt, and UI Center for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law (CPEEL), Omowumi Iledare noted that nothing should stop this new board from succeeding. In his words, this board has all it takes to succeed. The members have reached top echelons of their careers at one time or the other in the oil and gas industry. They will have mutual respect for each other because they knew each other before, and no one will see each other as subservient to one another. If this board fails to succeed, then NNPCL might as well forget seeing the expected good old days again “And if they fail, it must be because of political pressure from the government. He cautioned that these professionals, having been appointed, should be allowed to do their job unhindered.”
For the new NNPCL board to succeed, Professor Omowunmi, a one-time president of the USA Association for Energy Economics in 2008, the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) in 2014, and the Nigeria Association for Energy Economics (NAEE) from 2015 to 2019, advised the Board to be willing to rekindle, restructure, and rebrand the NNPCL. Members NEED to function apolitically and work with the corporate interest of Nigeria as their guiding philosophy. Iledare counsells the Board to come to terms quickly that they are not agents of the government and are to disavow the mentality of past thinking about NNPCL as a cash cow for the federal government. It must not be seen to be spending money on behalf of the federation but rather reposition the NNPCL to become a purely commercial limited company that must function like other international oil companies like Total Energies, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and others. They must work towards selling the shares of the company to the public and not allow established oil and gas companies to buy its shares.
The interview, which lasted one hour and eleven minutes, also touched on other issues like price fluctuations on petroleum products, Dangote Naira for crude oil ongoing public discussion, and the public power supply nightmare among the teeming population of Nigerians.
On the naira for crude sales policy granted to Dangote but later stopped, Professor Iledare, former GNPC Professor and Chair at UCC Oil and Gas Studies, expressed optimism that selling crude oil to Dangote Refinery will, in the long run, make sense because the forex exchange saved from petroleum import product discontinuation will strengthen the naira, insulate the federal government from forex exchange pressures, and translate to more money being in circulation. This policy could empower the people’s purchasing power to buy goods and services produced in the domestic economy.
On the public power supply issue, which had persisted despite the privatisation of the sector, he traced the fundamental problem to the ownership structure of the power generation, distribution, and transmission companies, which was not properly handled by the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), which supervised the unbundling exercise. “No proper policy analysis. No plan for metres for the prospective customers, no evidence of proper projection of long-term energy demand, and no discernment between industrial, commercial, and household consumption of power to be generated, distributed and transmitted.”
To get out of this problem, Professor Iledare, Executive Director, Emmanuel Egbogah Foundation, advised that the ongoing decentralisation and restructuring of the power supply sector be sustained along the three-tier chain of generation, distribution, and transmission and the devolution of powers to the states to generate and transmit their own power to their people.
Professor Omowumi Iledare, principal facilitator of FUPRE Energy Business School, lamented that the government had on several occasions ignored valuable contributions of intellectuals with a warning that “no nation can grow faster than the growth in its intellectual community. These intellectuals should be trusted to give policy direction and advice on key projects that will benefit the nation. Unfortunately, intellectuals and professionals are becoming too politicised to be useful in policy debate to promote what ought to be mantra for posterity,” he noted.
Report by Tunde Olaore
