“No nation, no company, and no institution can unlock the full value of its energy, resources in isolation.”
Few lines have captured Africa’s central energy challenge as precisely as this one above, delivered by Bashir Bayo Ojulari, Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd). He made the remark in his keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 25th Nigerian Oil and Gas (NOG) Energy Week at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, on July 7.
That quote underscored why competitive advantage in today’s energy economy rests more on the strength of its institutions than on the size of a nation’s reserves. That philosophy has defined Ojulari’s first year as GCEO of NNPC Ltd.
Nigeria remains Africa’s largest crude producer and holds roughly 17 per cent of the world’s proven gas reserves. Yet a myriad of challenges, including oil theft and ageing infrastructure, have long prevented this abundance from translating into prosperity. The Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) of 2021 converted NNPC into a commercial limited liability company, but the company needed more than legislation to deliver transformation that would stimulate real growth and serve the Nigerian people.
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Ojulari’s career spans nearly every segment of the value chain — from field engineer at Elf and three decades at Shell, culminating in leading Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production, to helping engineer the $2.4 billion indigenous acquisition of Shell’s onshore assets at Renaissance Africa Energy.
His leadership philosophy is visible in NNPC’s “Fit-for-Future” agenda, a bold attempt to remake the national energy company into a commercially disciplined, globally competitive institution, built around four pillars: Execution Excellence (disciplined planning, faster decisions), Profitable Growth (commercially sound, sustainable investment), Partner of Choice (transparency and honoured commitments), and Enterprise-First Mindset (institutional success over departmental interest).
The Fit-for-Future agenda also reinforces Tinubu’s broader reforms, strengthening investor confidence and accelerating projects like the AKK Gas Pipeline. Its deeper aim: a culture that outlasts any single administration.
However, four pillars and a mission statement are not, on their own, evidence of anything — corporate Nigeria has produced no shortage of frameworks that outlived their launch events by a year. What makes this one worth taking seriously is not the language but what follows it: whether the numbers below reflect a company executing a plan, or simply a company that got lucky on oil prices and called it strategy.
The record since April 2025 suggests execution has kept pace with rhetoric. Nigeria’s crude output has climbed to roughly 1.71 million barrels a day — a five-year high — while NNPC Exploration and Production Limited posted a record 365,000 bpd, part of a stated ambition of 2 million bpd by 2027 and 3 million by 2030. The Trans-Niger Pipeline achieved 100 per cent operational availability for the first time in years, and the company’s five export terminals averaged 98 percent operational recovery between April 2025 and May 2026 — a striking reversal from a period when Bonny Terminal’s recovery rate had fallen to around one percent.
Transparency has moved in step with production. NNPC resumed full monthly remittances to the Federation Account in July 2025, restored regular performance reporting, and held its first public earnings call. These are unglamorous, procedural changes — but for a company long criticised for opacity, procedure is the reform. On costs, Ojulari says contract restructuring has cut operating costs by roughly $3.4 billion, alongside a broader optimisation drive targeting up to $4.5 billion in additional savings.
Gas has become the clearest expression of NNPC’s industrialisation strategy under Ojulari. National output has risen to about 7.5 billion standard cubic feet a day, aided by the completed River Niger crossing on the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano pipeline and the ANOH processing plant. NNPC has signed Gas Sale and Purchase Agreements covering 1.29 billion scf/d of LNG feed gas and 750 million scf/d for domestic industry — including deals with Dangote Refinery and DFL FZE — representing more than $20 billion in associated investment, according to Ojulari.
While none of these figures, taken alone, proves institutional reform, what is different this time is the attendant effect: the cluster of recovery, remittance, reporting and reduced costs arriving together, in the same year, under the same agenda. It is still early to conclude, but this is the strongest available evidence that the reforms are working.
At NOG Energy Week, held under the theme “Forging Africa’s Strategic Energy Growth Through Global Collaboration,” Ojulari located Africa’s energy problem not in scarcity but in fragmentation. He asked: “How can a continent so richly endowed with energy resources remain home to some of the world’s largest energy deficits?”
As Ojulari told delegates, the energy industry is “one of the most interconnected industries in the world;” with its success resting not on any single company’s strength but on the collective effectiveness of the whole ecosystem around it.
As he noted, a producing field needs disciplined technical partners and patient capital. Service providers must convert geological potential into reliable output, and regulators must supply “clarity, consistency and predictability.” When enough of these links are weak, he emphasized, “nations remain resource-rich but prosperity-poor.”
His prescription – to move “beyond transactional relationships towards strategic partnerships, beyond isolated projects towards integrated value chains, beyond raw export towards industrial economies powered by those resources, and beyond fragmented national ambitions towards a truly collaborative African energy agenda,” – is an urgent and timely one. As he noted, NNPC is “not merely an energy producer but an ecosystem builder.”
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There are useful comparisons with Saudi Aramco, which transformed itself from a state oil producer into a diversified industrial and investment platform. Despite Nigeria’s peculiar challenges, including the pipeline vandalism and theft that persist in the Niger Delta, Ojulari is attempting an equivalent cultural and commercial shift without the advantages of deep sovereign capital and a more secured environment.
There is measurable progress even if 14 months is a short runway to conclude on the impact of reforms. Ojulari highlighted the need to “accelerate the development of “indigenous technical capacity capable of competing anywhere in the world.” But building capacity in any industry takes time. Whether the reforms outlast this leadership – as Ojulari himself insists they must – is the real measure still to come.
Nigeria has heard energy reform promised before. But, so far, Ojulari is earning the right to be called an institutional reformer, and the available data increasingly support that argument. However, building an ecosystem to reshape the future of Nigeria’s and Africa’s energy industries takes time, bold leadership, collaboration and shared commitment. The NNPC GCEO acknowledged this refrain in his keynote: “The future of African energy will not be determined solely by the resources beneath our soil. It will be determined by the quality of the partnerships we forge above it,” he said. Time will determine whether that ecosystem, and results of these reforms, endure for years to come.
*Arukaino Umukoro is a journalist, writer and communications strategist.