April 06, (THEWILL) – The change of baton at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) on April 2, 2025, ended the tenure of Mallam Mele Kyari as the Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) of the behemoth national oil firm. His over five- year tenure showed him as one with immense energy for storytelling.
Mele Kyari is a rapper; he talks at the least opportunity and quickly delves into storytelling. He has the future to foretell at any given time. Just give him the window, he embarks on navigating the stream of storytelling.
With Kyari, it is always a prophecy, a promise or a vow – something to soothe the nerves of his audience. “I assure you .…” “Let me assure you ….” “I can assure you ….” And he speaks with the strong voice of one interacting with the gods holding the periscope that peeps into tomorrow.
Enter storytelling
Speaking at the valedictory session for his successor, Dr Maikanti Baru, on July 6, 2019, in Abuja, Kyari disclosed that the new NNPC management (to be headed by him) would transform the country into a net exporter of petroleum products before the end of the tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari.
He noted (or boasted) that under his watch, the NNPC (as it was called then) would provide the much-needed incentives that would help the petroleum industry grow crude oil production to three million barrels per day and shore up the country’s crude oil reserves to 40 billion barrels.
He said: “I assure you that we will follow up to ensure that within the life of this administration — before President Muhammadu Buhari’s tenure ends in 2023 — we will deliver on the four refineries.”
He also pledged to show immense support to ensure the delivery of the Dangote Refinery in 2020. In fact, at the inauguration of the facility on May, 22, 2023, Kyari told the world that NNPCL would supply Dangote Petroleum Refinery 300,000 barrels of crude per day effective July 2023.
Visible pipedream
Delivering the four NNPCL refineries in Port Harcourt (2), Warri and Kaduna became a visible pipe dream under Kyari as he continued to push what looked like the soothsayer agenda. He never stuttered in his utterances because he is a smooth talker in whom there are no hesitations. In due course, Port Harcourt Refinery became an unending refrain.
During the nationwide strike by organised labour in July 2023 to protest the excruciating hardship resulting from the removal of fuel subsidy, President Bola Tinubu gave his commitment that the Port Harcourt Refinery would resume production in December, 2023 – a date supplied by NNPC under Kyari.
‘Promise kept’
Towards the end of the year, the NNPCL alerted Nigerians that it had delivered the facility. In a press release on December 21, 2023, signed by the NNPCL Chief Corporate Communications Officer, Olufemi O. Soneye, entitled “NNPC Ltd Fulfils Promise, Delivers Port Harcourt Refinery … Achieves Mechanical Completion, Flare Start-up of Refinery’s Area 5 Plant”, the national oil company claimed it had achieved its target of returning the facility to production in that month.
“In our quest to ensure that this refinery is re-streamed to continue to deliver value to Nigerians, we made a promise that we would reach a mechanical completion of phase one of the rehabilitation project by the end of December and get the other plants running in 2024. Today, we have kept those commitments,” it quoted Mele Kyari as announcing during a facility tour of the plant.
However, contrary to expectations anchored to the promises of Kyari, the Port Harcourt Refinery failed to resume actual production in December 2023 as promised. The true state of the facility has remained unestablished since then.
Only recently, the refinery was celebrated “for running 180 days non-stop”. Yet Nigerians are yet to feel the impact of the resumption of production at the Port Harcourt Refinery. Instead, importation of refined petroleum products has resumed in earnest following the collapse of the naira-to-crude deal with the Dangote Petroleum Refinery.
Previous versions
Before then, Kyari’s storytelling had resonated at another event. Speaking at the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) Energy and Labour Summit 2023 in Abuja on October 9, Kyari said, as a resource-dependent country, Nigeria should not be exporting 100 percent of its crude as it does at present.
“Today, we export 100 per cent of our productions, no resource-dependent country does this and that is why we must deliver on our mandate. I don’t want to speak about it; when it is done, you will see it.
“So, I don’t want to tell you we are going to revamp our refineries. That is too much of PowerPoint talks. So, it will be done and you will see it. I don’t want to speak about it, we are tired of speaking about it.
“But what we must achieve is that this country must be a net exporter of petroleum products and this is within sight,” Kyari said.
Similar narratives
While delivering his address at the Nigeria Oil and Gas Opportunity Fair held at the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) Conference Centre, Bayelsa, in May 2023, with the theme ‘The oil and gas industries: Catalyst and fuel for the industrialisation of Nigeria’, Kyari told his usual story.
He said, “The NNPC saw the strategic interest of doing business, and we will be supplying 300,000 barrels of Nigerian crude to Dangote Refinery from NNPC. That is a marketing opportunity.” The opposite turned out to be the real outcome.
Across the Atlantics
Reacting to Kyari’s television interview in Nigeria, Reuters on June 1, 2023, reported: “Nigeria’s state-owned oil company NNPC will soon end its monopoly on petrol supplies, its chief executive told local television on Thursday, a day after it nearly tripled prices at its fuel stations countrywide.
“Mele Kyari told Arise TV that prices were expected to come down once new companies started supplying petrol, bringing more competition.
“ All we did was to set variable prices depending on our costs by location and knowing full well that NNPC is the single supplier of the market and we are seeing that exit coming very, very quickly.
“There will be no monopoly, NNPC will not continue being the supplier of this product alone’,” Reuters quoted Kyari as saying.
U-turn occurs
In a dramatic turn, Kyari later stated that none of the importers licensed to bring in petrol have the capacity to do that, so NNPC will remain the sole importer.
“None of them (fuel companies) can do it today. For them, access to foreign exchange (FX) is difficult. We create FX, therefore we have access to FX and their access to FX is limited” – thus altering Kyari’s import liberalisation theory.
Approaching the pitch
After decades of total reliance on imported petroleum products, the (NNPCL in November 2024, announced that it had finally ended the age-long practice.
The NNPC’s GCEO, Mele Kyari, said at the 42nd Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) annual international conference and exhibition in Lagos, that the national oil company “is now off-taking fuel from the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and other local refineries”.
His company later denied him; maintaining that it had not ended importation of petroleum products contrary to what the organisation’s helmsman had said.
However, the same Mele Kyari LATER told the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, that going by the improvement in local production at the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and the revival of the nation’s four refineries, the country would end the importation of refined petroleum products in December 2024.
Kyari’s optimism followed the NNPC’s naira-for-crude agreement with Dangote Petroleum Refinery in July 2024.
Under the arrangement, the NNPC was expected to supply crude oil to Dangote Petroleum Refinery in exchange for refined products, which would then be distributed across the country to stabilise the fuel market.
According to NNPC, the development was expected to save Nigeria as much as $10 billion in hard currency in-country annually, as the national oil company said it now receives crude from the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Petroleum Refinery located in Lagos. This narrative remained a reality in the air.
As Kyari goes …
Recalling Kyari’s earlier promise of 300,000 barrels of crude daily to Dangote Petroleum Refinery effective July 2023, industry experts at the time had questioned how NNPCL would source the crude given the epileptic supply that had characterised its production culture.
Consequently, the naira-for-crude deal appeared a move to strengthen the pledge in what looked like an exercise in exceptional patriotism. But the excitement was short-lived.
Dangote in March 2025 announced the end of the deal on the ground that NNPCL had not fulfilled its part of the bargain by supplying it with the required feedstock.
In a statement entitled, ‘Temporary Suspension of Sales of Petroleum Products in Naira,’ the management of Dangote Petroleum Refinery explained that the decision was necessary to align its sales currency with the crude procurement currency.
“To date, our sales of petroleum products in naira have exceeded the value of naira-denominated crude we have received. As a result, we must temporarily adjust our sales currency to align with our crude procurement currency,” the statement read.
According to NNPCL, its default stemmed from shortage of crude as it had many forward commitments.
NNPCL has been unable to meet its crude oil supply obligations to local refineries due to its focus on servicing oil-backed loans. These loans which are tied to future crude oil productions have taken precedence over domestic commitments, leaving Dangote and other local refiners scrambling for supply.
There is simply not enough crude to go round for the interest of local refineries, and this is not likely to change any time soon as some of the crude-backed obligations last till 2030.
Oil in the North
What about the Kolomani oil and gas wells in the North-East Gombe and Bauchi area, with Oil Prospecting Licence 809 and 810 commissioned by former President Buhari in November 2022?
The field, according to NNPCL, was to start producing about 50,000 barrels of crude oil per day as it holds over one billion barrels of crude oil reserves, shooting up Nigeria’s oil reserves to over 38 billion barrels.
Again, this is not likely to happen in the nearest future; it was all part of Mallam Mele Kolo Kyari’s storytelling package.
Sam Diala is a Bloomberg Certified Financial Journalist with over a decade of experience in reporting Business and Economy. He is Business Editor at THEWILL Newspaper, and believes that work, not wishes, creates wealth.
