New board
President Bola Tinubu has appointed a new 9-member Board and Management team for the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL)…
President Bola Tinubu has appointed a new 9-member Board and Management team for the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), with Mele Kyari retained as the Group’s Chief Executive Officer. The new Board and Management team includes Pius Akinyelure as Non-Executive Chairman, Mele Kyari as Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO), Umar Isa Ajiya as Chief Financial Officer, and Ledum Mitee as Non-Executive Director. President Tinubu also named Permanent Secretaries for the finance and petroleum ministries. The appointments will be effective from 1 December 2023.
Some have described the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021 as an audacious attempt to overhaul the petroleum sector by providing legal, governance, regulatory and fiscal framework for the industry. The Act prescribed that the NNPCL transition into a limited liability company and cease being an industry regulator. Thus, the NNPCL’s board chairman is no longer the President or petroleum minister, as was the case in the past. However, the problem is that NNPCL continues to act as though nothing has changed, and keeping Mele Kyari as CEO signals business as usual. While the NNPCL is officially a privatised company, the firm still sits at the core of Nigeria’s political economy, and the appointments to its board and management are important. The composition of the NNPCL board suggests that the government is more interested in appeasing its supporters and silencing its critics than in appointing the most qualified candidates. Case in point: Pius Akinyelure was the pioneer vice chairman of the All Progressives Congress, and Ledum Mitee is the former president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People who has spoken out against environmental cleanup exercises in the Niger Delta and the host community component of the PIA 2021. In some quarters, there has also been talk about Umar Ajiya’s alliance with Atiku Abubakar, the former vice president and the flagbearer for the opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). As the Tinubu administration’s appointments solidify, whether this team can effectively tackle Nigeria’s fiscal and monetary woes remains unclear. We’ll wait and see.