One Year of Bayo Ojulari at NNPC

Obinna Chima

April 2, 2026, marked one year since Bayo Ojulari assumed office as Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), a tenure that has delivered a mixed scorecard at best. While marked by frequent policy pronouncements and reform intentions, his stewardship has largely fallen short of expectations in translating promises into measurable results.

Upon assuming duty, the engineer who vowed to pursue the company’s bold ambitions and build a national oil company that would be the pride of all Nigerians has continued to struggle to match his lofty promises with results.

“We stand at the gateway of a new era—one that demands courage, professionalism, and a relentless drive for excellence. The task before us is great, yet the opportunity to redefine Nigeria’s energy future is even greater. Now is the time to turn our transformation promise into performance,” were Ojulari’s words when he met thousands of the company’s staff while unveiling his agenda.

According to him, under his stewardship, he aims to attract sectoral investments worth $30 billion by 2027 and $60 billion by 2030; raise crude oil production to over 2 million barrels per day, sustained through 2027 and attain 3 million bpd by 2030; expand refining output to 200kbpd by 2027, and 500kbpd by 2030; grow gas production to 10bcf per day by 2027, and 12bcf by 2030 and deepen energy access and affordability for all Nigerians.

But while it is on record that the Presidency, even before Ojulari assumed office, had taken steps to attract investment to the oil and gas sector, a critical review of the past one year under the GCEO highlights a number of significant inefficiencies and policy concerns.

For instance, despite clear production targets he set from the outset, Nigeria has struggled to consistently meet its quota under the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for a substantial part of the past year. 

To be sure, as the hand of the government at the upstream level, the NNPC is mandatorily involved in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas. Through joint ventures and production sharing contracts with international oil companies, it helps locate new reserves, develop oil fields, and ensure steady output.

But because it has largely underperformed in this respect, Nigeria recorded a combined crude oil and condensate production shortfall of about 16.6 million barrels in January and February of 2026, according to a recent THISDAY analysis of data released by the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC).

However, the NUPRC, during a visit by its Chief Executive, Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, to the Ministry of Finance on Thursday, put the country’s current output at 1.84 million bpd in ‘recent days’. But industry watchers do not take such extempore pronouncements by government officials seriously until the release of OPEC’s monthly data, which in most cases, are at variance and typically lower.

In fact, to show that not much has changed since Ojulari took over the reins of governance at the NNPC, at the time he was appointed last year, precisely in April 2025, official data showed that Nigeria produced 1.683 million bpd of crude oil and condensate.  But almost a year later, in February 2026, the latest monthly data released by the NUPRC showed that the country could only manage to produce 1.483 million bpd of the liquids. From all indications, this looks like a reversal of the moderate gains made by the NNPC before his appointment.

Equally, the NNPC recently released its financial and operational reports for January 2026, which put its revenue for the month at N2.571 trillion, representing a 46.7 per cent decline from the N4.82 trillion reported in the previous month.  This revenue figure was in sharp contrast with both oil and gas sales, which were recorded during the period. The N2.571 trillion revenue recorded in January reflected a N2.249 trillion decline compared to the N4.82 trillion posted in December. For a national oil company critical to the economic survival of the country, this sudden drop in revenue without explanation should ordinarily be unacceptable.

Besides, crude oil and condensate production during the month averaged 1.64 million bpd. Compared with December’s total production of about 1.60 million bpd, January output represented a 2.5 per cent month-on-month increase. Despite the production improvement, the January financial report raised questions of transparency in the management of Nigeria’s oil resources. This is because simple economics expects that when you sell higher volumes of commodities, you make higher revenue. But in the case of NNPC, the reverse was the case.

Another troubling development under Ojulari in the past 365 days was that, in spite of the establishment of the Frontier Exploration Fund (FEF) from which over N450 billion was realised by the NNPC in 2025 alone, Nigeria’s oil reserves have continued to decline.

This was an indication that the national oil company is not doing enough to grow the country’s oil reserves. Nigeria’s 2P (proven plus probable) crude oil and condensate reserves in 2026 stand at 31.09 billion barrels and 5.92 billion barrels, respectively, amounting to a total of 37.01 billion barrels. In the same vein, the 2P Associated Gas (AG) and Non-Associated Gas (NAG) reserves stand at 100.21 Trillion Cubic Feet (TCF) and 114.98 TCF, respectively, resulting in total Gas reserves of 215.19 TCF. 

For context, in 2025, Nigeria’s crude oil reserves stood at 37.28 billion barrels, falling from 37.50 billion barrels in 2024, the NUPRC announced at the time.

Nigeria’s frontier exploration fund was created under the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) in 2021 to finance exploration in the frontier basins of the country where hydrocarbons are suspected but not yet proven or commercially developed.  In plain terms, it was designed to search for new oil and gas deposits in underexplored regions, expand Nigeria’s reserves base beyond the traditional Niger Delta and de-risk exploration in difficult or unproven terrains where private investors are usually reluctant to go.

These frontier basins include places like the Chad Basin, Sokoto Basin, Anambra Basin, Benue Trough, Dahomey Basin, and others.

Before President Bola Tinubu stopped the administration by the NUPRC and the NNPC early this year, instructing direct payment to the Federation Account, the law mandated that about 30 per cent of NNPC’s profit from oil and gas production-sharing contracts be set aside for this purpose. But despite the huge accruals, Nigeria’s reserves declined instead of the expected increase.

More unsettling in the past one year is the lack of clarity on the fate of NNPC’s refineries. What plan does the NNPC have for its refineries? Are they to be rehabilitated, privatised, or quietly phased out?  Huge funds are still being expended on them, even as the facilities remain non-functional.  Without the Dangote Refinery, a 650,000 bpd facility, the shockwaves from the ongoing Iran–Israel/US conflict would have weighed far more severely on Nigerians and their already strained livelihoods. These are the questions begging for answers about Nigeria’s refineries as NNPC’s traditional role as the guarantor of national energy security continues to weaken under Ojulari’s watch, leaving stakeholders uncertain about the strategic direction of Nigeria’s downstream sector.

From the foregoing, what stands in the past one year is a steady stream of policy announcements, forward-looking declarations and strategic intentions that have yet to translate into visible outcomes.  In fact, it would seem that the more things change, the more they remain the same!

In a sector as critical and historically burdened as Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, intent without execution only deepens public scepticism. Leadership in a national oil company and the NNPC at this moment in Nigeria’s economic trajectory demands execution at scale.  This must be followed with some level of credibility. If the current trajectory continues, Ojulari’s tenure may be remembered less for transformation and more for a prolonged phase of deferred expectations.