December 6, 2021

President Muhammadu Buhari’s ascetic lifestyle has found a match in Mallam Mele Kyari’s predilection to probity and transparency. The result is a nimble-footed Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) owned by Nigerians, operated by Nigerians and working for the common good of all Nigerians. It is a sharp departure from a torrid past when the name NNPC conjured filthy images of corruption, opacity and greasy sleaze.

Today, NNPC has flipped the page. Since July 7, 2019, when Kyari, a geologist and earth scientist versed in crude exploration, refinery, marketing and management of the petroleum value chain became the 19^th Group Managing Director, GMD, of NNPC, the nation’s oil and gas behemoth has turned to the path of profitability and accountability. And for the first time in its many decades of existence (44 years), NNPC opened its ledger for Nigerians to scrutinize. It subjected its books to audit and submitted itself to public appraisal. Kyari’s appointment thus became the inflection point in the long journey of the company through the wilderness of mismanagement. Nigerians now have a company they can call their own.

Kyari is quick to attribute the bouquet of successes recorded within the NNPC under his watch to the non-interference and zero-corruption values of President Buhari. As the substantive Minister of Petroleum Resources and President, Buhari has limitless powers to determine how the oil and gas sector is run. His clout as President and superintending power as minister give him unfettered access not only to the vault of NNPC but also to vicarious ownership of huge swathes of oil fields. But never! Buhari is not a leader given to primitive acquisition. He is not sold out to lucre; neither is he sucked into the quick sands of greed and primordial thievery which consumed many of his predecessors and a huge crowd of Nigerians in both private and public sectors. He is guided by his personal values of discipline and contentment couched in his now famous quote ‘the most comfortable thing is to live within your means and damn the consequences.”

In October while addressing Nigerian editors as Special Guest of Honour at the All Nigeria Editors’ Conference, the flagship annual conference of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, Kyari ascribed the success achieved by NNPC to President Buhari’s zero meddlesomeness in the running of NNPC. He told the editors: “this is the first time in history that NNPC and its subsidiaries are allowed to do things the way things should be done.”

Hear Kyari again: “President Muhammadu Buhari has never asked us to do anything in our transactions. He has never sent anyone to compromise any of our processes,” he said at a recent event to mark the 3rd World Anti-Corruption Day, organised by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Last year, while delivering a public lecture at the Usmanu Danfodio University in Sokoto, Kyari said: “President Muhammadu Buhari has given our management team a free-hand to deliver on our mandate, and he remains the only president that has never interfered in the operations of the Corporation.”

He reaffirmed this at an interactive session with the National Association of Energy Correspondents (NAEC) in Abuja, recently when he said: “I can tell you that the privileges we have today in this company of having unfettered control without any distraction or interference to make decisions and be accountable and responsible for our decisions has never happened until this government. I can tell you this because I have been around for 29 years and have worked closely with top management of the NNPC for about 15 years. This is the only President who has never asked NNPC to do something.”

Buhari’s ramrod straight character has given Kyari and his team at NNPC the impetus to envision and freely execute their vision. And the results speak for themselves. A tech-driven NNPC operation, a genuine determination to revive the moribund refineries, an ambitious 614km Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano (AKK) Gas Pipeline Project, among other bold socio-economic undertakings are standout emblems of a company on a new threshold of efficiency.

It’s all about leadership. Every leadership has its peculiar dialectics. Since assuming office, Kyari came with his own flair of leadership. He was blunt and resolute about it. He said he would lead by example, by the tenets of good corporate governance. And ever since, he has kept faith. Superintending over mega corporations like NNPC often throws up mega challenges. This is where smart leaders deploy the concept of strategic leadership: the ability to make the vision plain, ensure that all parties understand it, empower the key drivers of the various units to mobilise the entire workforce with the sole purpose of achieving set goals. The net result is organisational efficiency. And this is what Kyari has achieved with his team at NNPC, with very strong support from President Buhari. That liberty freely granted him by President Buhari has produced intended outcomes.

For a company that has a long history of operational opacity, Kyari chose to swim against the tide. Rather than maintain the status quo of secrecy, he opened NNPC books. He invited auditors to comb through the ledger. It was an equivalent of a corporate suicide. But he stuck to his gun against a groundswell of agitation even from within the industry that he must never attempt to wash the nation’s dirty linen in public. But effective leadership does not pander to emotional blurts. That remarkable decision to audit the NNPC accounts for 2018, 2019 and 2020 helped to let Nigerians into the operational hazards, triumphs and challenges of NNPC. His argument, very potent and germane, was that NNPC belongs to Nigerians and that as collective shareholders, Nigerians deserve to know the financial status of the entity they own.

Before Kyari, nobody knew whether NNPC was making profits or just incurring losses. It was just treated as a public cash cow which made a few privileged Nigerians richer but left the entire nation bleeding. Kyari changed the narrative. The audit showed that it suffered a loss of N803 billion in 2018 which was massively reduced to N1.7 billion in 2019. However, by 2020, according to the audited account, the trajectory of losses changed to profitability.

On August 16, 2020, President Buhari altered forever the course of NNPC. He signed the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) into law and what has suffered legislative abuse for over two decades in the National Assembly as PIB became the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA). That singular episode was not only historical but it marked a milestone in the nation’s chequered history of oil exploration and exploitation. Buhari has the historical fortune of being the President who mustered the political will to give life to the law some lecherous potentates who had fed fat from the distortions and administrative disorientation in the oil and gas sector never wanted to see the light of day. On that exalted podium of history, President Buhari stands with Kyari, a self-effacing engineer, whom despite the transcendental reforms he has wrought in the NNPC, attracts no attention to himself.

On August 26, ten days after the PIB became legally the PIA, the statutory audited accounted of NNPC for 2020 was already out and it was the obligation of President Buhari as Minister of Petroleum Resources to make public the audit report. This time, the crimson red lines of losses had morphed into lush blue lines: NNPC had for the first time in history made a profit after tax of N287 billion in 2020.

By his own admission, Kyari said President Buhari gave him the freedom to run NNPC as a people-owned enterprise whose fortune must impact positively on the people. In President Buhari, Kyari has a boss whose austere values and fiscal frugality are legendary. Obviously, Buhari has implicit confidence in Kyari who himself flaunts an impeccable pedigree of about three decades within the NNPC system before his appointment as GMD. He has not abused that confidence. President Buhari wants a culture of probity at NNPC. He demands accountability to the people.

Kyari set out by launching the Transparency, Accountability and Performance Excellence (TAPE) initiative which has become the corporate compass internalized by the staff. TAPE is about keeping the books open, about publishing financial reports and information on transactions. It’s a radical break from the past,  which is not only commendable but should be the benchmark for other revenue-generating agencies.  By publishing the financial reports of NNPC for 2018, 2019 and 2020, Kyari has shown he has nothing to hide. He has broken a 44-year-old jinx steeped in the foundation of fiscal muddiness. Kyari’s redoubtable reforms at NNPC is not lost on the world. It has earned rave commendations from global bodies including the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour under the US Department of State which in its 2020 Report on Human Rights Practices in Nigeria singled out NNPC for special mention on accountability and openness. Other International bodies like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) which described it as a ‘significant milestone’, and the Open Government Partnership, have at various times commended Kyari for historically instituting a culture of transparency in an environment once steeped in the cesspit of graft and abuse of corporate governance.

The very fact that the same US report which condemned some sectors and state actors in Nigeria for corruption and human rights abuses singled out NNPC under Kyari for its fiscal transparency attests to the birthing of a new order of excellence and financial probity. President Buhari has chosen to do good in the oil and gas sector; to stamp a seal of operational fidelity at NNPC. And in Kyari, he has found a worthy foreman. This is the sense in which it is safe to say that Nigeria is having her best moments in the once murky oil and gas sector.

• Author: Ken Ugbechie, publisher, Political Economistng