Abbey Ngochindo and the Case for Resilience in Nigeria’s Petroleum Supply Chain

By Tolulope Oke

When the federal government removed the petrol subsidy on May 29, 2023, the pump price leapt almost overnight from about one hundred and eighty five naira a litre to between four hundred and eighty eight and five hundred and fifty seven naira, and by mid July it had passed six hundred naira. The shock rippled through every distribution network in the country. For Abbey Ngochindo, a downstream petroleum and logistics professional whose views on the subject have drawn growing attention in the trade, the episode confirmed a long held argument. The central weakness of Nigeria’s fuel system, he contends, is not the volume of product available. It is the fragility of the system that moves it.

Resilience has become the organising idea of Ngochindo’s professional thinking, and increasingly of his research. He defines it plainly. A resilient supply chain keeps products flowing even when something goes wrong, and in Nigeria something is almost always going wrong. Roads flood. Trucks break down. Depots lose power. Policy shifts overnight, as the subsidy decision showed. Foreign exchange swings without warning.

“We design our operations as though every day will be a perfect day,” Ngochindo observes. “Then the first disruption comes and the whole chain seizes up. Resilience means planning for the bad day, not the good one. The operators who survived the events of this year are the ones who prepared for them during the calm.”

His perspective is grounded in direct experience. He has supervised operations at government owned depots spread across eight states, from Lagos and Ogun in the south west to Kaduna and Zamfara in the north and on to Rivers and Delta in the south. Coordinating product movement across such distances, through varied terrain and shifting conditions, taught him that no single point of failure can be allowed to halt the entire system.

“I learned to ask a simple question of every operation,” he says. “What happens if this one thing fails? If the answer is that everything stops, then you have not built a supply chain. You have built a trap, and you are waiting to fall into it.”
The lesson he draws is the value of redundancy and flexibility. A resilient operator does not rely on one route, one supplier or one mode of transport, but builds alternatives in advance, so that when a primary path closes a secondary path is already prepared. This costs money in the short term, which is why many operators resist it. Ngochindo insists the cost of unpreparedness is always higher, and the events following the subsidy removal proved his point in real time as poorly hedged operators were caught flat.

He points to contingency management as the discipline that separates serious operators from the rest. In his depot years he repeatedly reviewed operational plans and oversaw procedures designed to keep products moving when conditions deteriorated. Manpower deployment, facilities maintenance and adherence to safety and regulatory requirements were treated not as box ticking but as the scaffolding that holds operations together under stress.

Ngochindo is equally concerned with the human dimension. “You cannot write a procedure for every emergency,” he says. “At some point you have to trust the judgment of people who understand the operation. A well trained crew can improvise its way through a crisis that would paralyse an inexperienced one. That is why developing your people matters as much as any piece of equipment you will ever buy.”

The stakes extend well beyond the balance sheets of individual companies. Fuel is the bloodstream of the Nigerian economy, and when distribution falters the consequences reach markets, factories, hospitals and homes. A driver stuck in a queue is a worker not at his desk, a trader not at her stall, a delivery not made. Resilience in petroleum distribution, Ngochindo argues, is therefore a matter of national productivity, not merely corporate efficiency.

He is cautious about easy promises. Building a resilient supply chain is slow, unglamorous work whose success is measured by the crises that never happen. “Nobody celebrates the fuel shortage that did not occur,” he says with a wry smile. “But that is exactly what good planning delivers, a problem the public never sees. The reward for resilience is silence, and you have to learn to value that silence.”

His ambition is to see resilience treated as a core competence rather than an afterthought reserved for crises. “Supply will always have its ups and downs,” he concludes. “What we can control is how well we bend without breaking. That is the work, and it never really ends.”