Mele Kyari: Where Have His Allies Gone?

Mele Kyari spent six years as the most powerful oil executive in Nigeria. Today, he is reportedly in Germany receiving medical treatment, facing a Senate arrest warrant over an unverified N210 trillion audit query, and largely alone in how he is handling it.

Kyari’s response, issued from abroad, was measured. He said he was shocked by the warrant, that his lawyers in Abuja are representing him, and that he intends to return once his health permits. It was the statement of a man managing a crisis from a distance, without the chorus of support that once surrounded his office.

That chorus has gone quiet. After Kyari’s removal, NNPCL sacked more than 200 staff in a restructuring that specifically targeted executives built around him.

Bala Wunti, the former NAPIMS head, was summoned alongside Kyari and is still working through the Senate probe in Nigeria. Ibrahim Onoja, former MD of Kaduna Refinery, and Lawal Sade, former Chief Compliance Officer and MD of NNPC Trading, were dismissed in the same sweep. Only Umar Ajiya Isa, the former CFO, has stayed publicly loyal, insisting before legislative panels that no funds are actually missing.

Beyond NNPCL’s walls, private oil players who grew close to Kyari, including Matrix Energy’s Abdulkabir Aliu, Levene Energy’s Ogbe, and former Delta State Governor James Ibori, have said nothing publicly since his removal. The political cover that once shielded him has thinned too. Femi Gbajabiamila, now President Bola Tinubu’s Chief of Staff, was an early protector, but the man who built Kyari’s path to NNPCL in the first place, the late Abba Kyari, is no longer alive to make calls on his behalf.

Not that any of this proves abandonment. Nigerian political loyalty can survive away from the cameras. Still, the gap between the crowd that once surrounded Kyari’s office and the silence around him now is hard to miss.