31 marginal fields are on the auction block; but who gets what will depend on the shifting political equation ahead of legislative and presidential elections in 2015.
A sinister plot to factionalize and destabilize the opposition ahead of next year’s legislative and presidential elections involving the long-running practice of using oil blocks in shady quid pro quo vote-buying deals in party leadership contests is now being fine-tuned in the presidency, Huhuonline.com has learnt from Aso Rock sources. Having lost the numbers game with the defection of 37 PDP lawmakers to the APC; and with more defections to follow in the Senate, President Goodluck Jonathan is facing the battle for his own political survival on two main fronts: within his own party where some northerners and southern hardliners are opposed to his re-election, and in the general election itself where the deck is stacked in favor of an eventual APC candidate.
Jonathan has therefore decided to wield the carrot and the big stick, by going back to the form book of his predecessors. Huhuonline.com learnt from presidential sources that the strategy involves using oil blocks to woo prominent APC chieftains like Bola Tinubu, Chief Bisi Akande, Governor Rotimi Amaechi and other top-notch opposition leaders such as Nasir El-Rufai and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar who could stand in the way of Jonathan’s 2015 presidential ambitions. For added advantage, the anti-graft agencies will be on standby; ready to harass the opposition chieftains, most of whom are former barons of the regime with skeletons in their cupboards that could be exhumed by the EFCC.
The source noted that the primary target are the “older generation and former PDP members; they are politicians with clout who have built a formidable following in their domain. They have name recognition and will see reason in supporting Jonathan, the devil they know against moving into uncharted territory or being part of complex inconsequential political arrangements in the APC with doubtful outcomes.” The source also added that Tinubu is the first APC bigwig who has been proposed oil blocks since he is already an oilman with his company Oando. The source further explained that Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) essentially engineered the initial merger, with Gen. Muhammadu Buhari’s moribund Congress for Progressive Change making them the principal leaders of the APC. The PDP will orchestrate a schism over Buhari’s long-standing ambition to be president as a justification for Tinubu and his followers to back out of the APC and back Jonathan for the presidency.
The lynchpin in the plot is the almighty Oil Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke who officially announced last November 28 that 31 marginal fields were to be put on the market at the same time, the Nigeria Petroleum Development Corporation (NPDC) announced it is selling its operatorship rights on several blocks that Royal Dutch Shell is auctioning off in the Niger Delta as part of its divestment program. Although Alison-Madueke claims the transactions will unfold in full transparency, the fact that elections are looming large has triggered much behind-the-scenes horse trading within the PDP and its rambling army of hardcore adherents and desperate power seekers, including dissenters like Babangida Aliyu and his Jigawa State counterpart, Sule Lamido; influential actors within the PDP, who are players with deep knowledge of political foot-shuffling. This issue of oil blocks was discussed when Aliyu and Lamido met with Jonathan at the villa last weekend.
The strategy went into full throttle when the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) last month began show-casing the oil fields in question in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kaduna and Abuja; without publishing the lists of permits. The first pre-qualification round will be held in January and firms chosen to bid will have until early March to submit their technical and financial offers and the winners would be known by April. Companies involved must be at least 51% owned by Nigerians and none will be able to bid for more than three fields. But the information has been kept secret and circulated only among companies with very high political connections such as Talaveras, Petrobay, Seplat and the Transcorp conglomerate. Some of the companies, indeed, have already told the DPR what oil fields they are interested in and even went further saying how much they’re willing to pay. Among the 31 fields on the list, a copy of which was obtained by Huhuonline.com include: the Egbolom field on OML 23 that was previously operated by Shell in Rivers state; the Uzuaku field on OML 11 in Ogoniland; three offshore fields on OML 100 (Usoro, Ikong Ibiom) and two on OML 67 (Amaniba and Ekpat).
In addition to these insiders, other pre-qualified companies include Glencore E&P in conjunction with Nigeria’s Yinka Folawiyo and Nestoil; and South Atlantic Petroleum owned by former defence minister Theophilus Danjuma in conjunction with Russian firms Vertex and Pamplona. Huhuonline.com learnt that for all his efforts keeping Jonathan’s second term bid alive, PDP Chairman Bamanga Tukur will get an oil block through his son-in-law, Sheriff, who is married to Tukur’s daughter born with his 4th wife, Mariam, an Ijaw like Jonathan. Sheriff is the son of Bola Shagaya, one of Nigeria’s wealthiest women and a close friend and confidant of Jonathan’s wife, Patience; who is involved in Bayelsa Oil Company, Britain’s Heritage Oil partner in the brand new JV Petrobay Energy; through which Heritage is expected to win several Shell fields in the Niger Delta, including the oil-rich OML 29 in Bayelsa state.
In the race to buy Shell's stakes on OML 18, 24, 25 and 29, the NPDC is an invisible referee and player at the same time. Counting on his connections, Sheriff is expected to win not only Shell's fields but also the status of operator on them. Following Shell's departure, that role would theoretically fall to the NPDC. But NPDC recovered operatorship of three permits last year (OML 30, 40 and 42) which Jonathan hopes to use as carrots to secure re-election in 2015. The recipients of these oil blocks will then sell them to foreign partners and pocket their commissions running into millions of dollars.
Oilmen wheeling and dealing
Amongst the most notable allocation of oil blocks include OML 110 awarded in 1996 by Gen. Sani Abacha to Cavendish Petroleum owned by Alhaji Mai Daribe, the Borno Patriarch. With an estimated 500 million barrels of oil, this block is worth $50 billion in reserves using average benchmark of $100 per barrel. Abacha also awarded OPL 246 which produces 300,000 bpd to Sapetro owned by Theophilus Danjuma in 1998. This block was so lucrative that Sapetro divested its investment for $1 billion. In 1999, Abdulsalami Abubakar awarded OML 112 and OML 117 to Amni Int. Petroleum Development Company owned by his in-law, Colonel Sani Bello. Amni runs Afren plc and Vitol. Afren and Vitol operate Ebok oil fields in OML 67 with 300,000 bpd owned by Babangida’s in-law Alhaji Mohammed Indimi, from Niger state. Former Oil Minister and OPEC chairman, Rilwanu Lukman, also has stakes in all these companies.
Seplat Petroleum owned by Prince Nasiru Ado Bayero, cousin to Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi operates the Asu Okpu/Umutu fields with a capacity of 300,000 bpd which translates to $30 million daily at a benchmark of $100 per barrel. Bayero also has stakes in Intel owned by Atiku and late former President Yar’Adua. The most controversial block was OML 245 worth over $20 billion awarded by Abacha to Malabu Oil & Gas owned by his Oil Minister Dan Etete. In 2001, Atiku got Obasanjo to revoke the license but Etete was later paid over $1 million in a shady deal involving Jonathan in 2011.
Obasanjo awarded OPL 233 and 289 to Cleanwater Consortium, comprising Cleanwater Refinery and RivGas Petroleum and Gas owned by Peter Odili; whose brother-in- law, Okey Ezenwa runs the consortium as Vice Chairman. Baba also gave OPL 286 to Focus Energy in partnership with BG Group, a British oil concern, run by Andy Uba through proxies. OPL 291 was awarded by Obasanjo to Starcrest Energy Nigeria Ltd, owned by Emeka Offor, who later sold it to Addax for a mouth-watering $35 million. Mike Adenuga’s Conoil owns six blocks and exports over 200,000 bpd. In April 2011, Adenuga attempted to buy Shell’s OML 30 for $1.2 billion, but the deal was blocked by Alison-Madueke; who later short-changed Nigerians by selling the block to Heritage Oil for $800 million.
This unorthodox practice which began under Babangida has been perfected by successive Nigerian presidents who discretionarily use oil blocks to dispense patronage to friends, cronies and mistresses without due process. Jonathan hopes to trade-off these operating licenses to opposition leaders who agree to rally behind his 2015 presidential ambitions. Tinubu is believed to control the Southwest which Jonathan must win, to give himself any shot at the presidency. Tinubu is vulnerable because of his indebtedness to Jonathan. The former Lagos State governor was all but certain to be jailed by the ICPC, but he scurried to the Villa and after meeting the President, the case against him was dismissed.
There are also speculations that Atiku has the option to talk with the APC or move his followers in the PDM to raise the hand of Jonathan. It is widely believed that Atiku is keeping afloat and financing the PDM since the death of its founder, Shehu Yar’Adua, to be a stand-by strategy for him as a negotiation platform when the chips are down. Tradition has it in Nigeria that election years are always preceded by a huge sell-off of oil licenses. Looking ahead to legislative and presidential elections in 2015, Jonathan is making sure everything both in the book and outside is being put into capturing the ticket.
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The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has offered whistleblowers between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent of recovered stolen Nigerian assets held abroad for information that leads to their recovery.
Olukoyede disclosed this on Wednesday while delivering a lecture at the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime in the United Kingdom.
According to him, the ability of EFCC operatives to trace assets, cooperation from the judiciary and access to credible intelligence have played important roles in the commission’s success in securing non-conviction-based forfeiture orders.
He also described the EFCC as having some of the best investigators in the world and stressed the importance of protecting and encouraging whistleblowers.
He said anyone with credible information about stolen Nigerian assets taken or hidden anywhere in the world could receive between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent of the recovered assets as an incentive, with payment made after the recovery.
Olukoyede further revealed that the EFCC had forfeited cash and assets worth more than $500 million to the Federal Government within the past three years.
He cited several cases involving the recovery and forfeiture of assets, including cases linked to a former Chairman of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a former Attorney-General of the Federation.
The EFCC chairman explained that the commission is legally empowered to seek the forfeiture of suspected proceeds of crime by applying to the High Court for an order. He said the process is similar to procedures used in countries such as Australia and Canada.
Olukoyede also recalled a case involving an aircraft allegedly acquired by an individual who was accused of receiving about $30 million in bribes in connection with a power project. He said the aircraft was forfeited about three months ago and had subsequently been added to the presidential air fleet.
He also referred to a property containing about 753 housing units that was forfeited from a former CBN governor, against whom the EFCC has filed criminal charges in three courts.
Speaking about the immediate past Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, Olukoyede said the EFCC opened an investigation following allegations of abuse of office. He claimed that investigators traced about 57 properties to Malami and that approximately 48 of them had been forfeited.
The EFCC chairman further mentioned the forfeiture of a private university allegedly linked to a director in the Federal Ministry of Health. According to him, the official voluntarily surrendered the property following the commission’s investigation.
Olukoyede said the measures demonstrate the importance of asset tracing, international cooperation, credible intelligence and whistleblower protection in the fight against financial crime and the recovery of stolen public assets.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery has raised concerns over the growing volume of imported petrol entering Nigeria, warning that it could be forced to export more of its own production if the trend continues.
The refinery said imported Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) made up roughly 43 per cent of the petrol supplied to the Nigerian market in July. It argued that the development was creating serious difficulties for a domestic refinery with the capacity to produce enough fuel for the country.
Dangote Refinery explained that it has maintained sizeable petrol reserves since commencing operations to ensure that consumers across Nigeria have access to a reliable supply. Keeping those reserves, it noted, requires substantial expenditure on storage, transportation and working capital.
However, the refinery said the continued granting of import licences without adequate information about expected import volumes has made it increasingly difficult to determine how much petrol should be produced and stored for the local market.
The company said holding large quantities of petrol becomes financially burdensome when there is no certainty about how much imported fuel will compete for the same market. It therefore considers exporting surplus stocks a more commercially viable option than allowing them to remain in storage indefinitely.
According to the refinery, increased exports in recent months should not be interpreted as evidence that Nigeria lacks sufficient refining capacity. Instead, the exports are being driven by excess stock resulting from unpredictable import volumes.
Dangote Refinery maintained that it remains fully committed to supplying the Nigerian market and has the capacity to meet or surpass the country's petrol requirements. It said its decision to export surplus products was aimed at managing inventory efficiently and avoiding unnecessary storage and financing expenses.
The refinery also warned that market disruptions caused by excessive imports could make it harder for domestic refiners to accurately predict demand. Any resulting supply problems, it said, should not automatically be blamed on local refineries.
It urged regulators and other industry stakeholders to improve transparency around petrol imports and strengthen coordination within the downstream petroleum market.
The company argued that policies that give greater support to domestic refining would help Nigeria reduce its dependence on imported fuel, conserve foreign exchange, strengthen energy security and maximise the economic benefits of investments in local refining infrastructure.
Dangote Refinery said it remains prepared to supply the country but stressed that a more predictable and transparent market environment is necessary for efficient production and inventory management.
Business
In The Spotlight
A group of heartless carpetbaggers have captured the Nigerian state, and it appears that they, their biological and political descendants, will hold the levers of government and access to Nigeria’s commonwealth for a long time to come.
When you consider news reports of how previous and current state actors steal public funds, buy choice properties in the toniest districts of Nigeria’s major cities, acquire private jets, and even establish private universities, you wonder if some people have more than two heads, to adopt a Yoruba phrase.
Either because of an inability to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of Nigerian citizens, or by intention, the political elite have kept the people poor, causing them to depend on the largeness of heart of the same elite to meet their existential needs.
That explains why poor, downtrodden, and unconnected Nigerians eagerly collect crumbs of measly N5,000, rice, gari and whatever else the politicians offer to obtain their election votes or acquiescence after rigging the elections.
When watching an economically disadvantaged individual tell a politician who is seeking to become a legislator the good news that his wife just had a new baby, and he needed to prepare for the naming ceremony, it felt like the oppressed poor were enabling his oppressor to further oppress him.
It was like the classic case of Stockholm syndrome, of victims collaborating with their “captors” to cement the oppressive stranglehold that they already had over the state and the commonwealth of the nation, thus unwittingly arresting their own future development.
A running mate to a former governorship candidate in a Southwestern state hilariously regaled Nigerians with the story of how constituents would have raided all the alcoholic drinks in his refrigerator in the early hours of the morning, even before he woke from the hectic campaign tour of the previous day.
The political elite have practically cornered the Nigerian state for themselves, children, tribesmen and acolytes, and have devised a way to admit only those that they have found to be loyal, or pliable, into their rank of oppressors.
The oppression of the citizens of Nigeria is easily accomplished because of the high illiteracy level amongst the poor masses. The use of the weapon of illiteracy is more evident in Northern Nigeria, whose political leaders somehow turn a blind eye to the illiteracy and underdevelopment of their people.
In 2024, UNICEF revealed that out of Nigeria’s 18.3 million out-of-school children, about 12.1 million, or 66 per cent, were resident in the Northwest and Northeast regions. Yet, instead of expanding educational facilities and opportunities, some Northern governors are arranging mass weddings for children who are hardly out of their teen years.
And this is not to deny the weaponisation of illiteracy even in Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Region, which is regarded as the Athens of Nigeria, after its pre-Independence head start of free, universal and compulsory primary school education.
As if he had a premonition that Nigeria’s so-called democrats would eventually compromise education, to the detriment of the lowest and marginalised masses, that Karl Marx described as the “lumpen proletariat”, French political thinker Montesquieu argued a long time ago that “It is in a republican government that the whole power of education is required.”
Western Nigeria’s free education scheme was gradually abandoned from the days of the Second Republic when some Yoruba members of President Shehu Shagari’s political party knocked it off its bottom with the argument that “qualitative” education was better than “free” education.
It is more than a shame that a free, universal and compulsory primary school education scheme was abandoned under President Shagari, who not only was a trained teacher, but had a career as a teacher before his political career.
Awolowo had warned Nigeria’s political elite with the following quip: “The children of the poor that you failed to educate will not let your children sleep peacefully.” The insecurity that currently occurs in nearly every part of Nigeria only drives Awolowo’s point home.
Probably the realm of the Nigerian republic that has been most complicit with the carpetbagger political elite is the media, whose members either serve the elites as press secretaries who kill media brushfires, or editors who either run planted stories, or spike stories that the politicians do not want published.
The media is so compromised that it can hardly perform those responsibilities assigned to it by Section 22 of the Nigerian Constitution, which are to “be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in (Chapter II of the Constitution) and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people.”
Some apologists have argued on behalf of the media that the political elite have so run the economy aground that the media, which can only thrive as commercial enterprises within Nigeria’s quasi-capitalist economy, cannot stay afloat, especially with the devastating inroads that the digital media are making into their audience, advertising revenue and profit.
The absence of regional economies, the argument goes, prevents the emergence of regional newspapers that can thrive on advertising revenues from regional companies, the way it obtains in the economies of North America and Western Europe. Many Nigerian newspapers, that are essentially regional, often pretend to be national to receive advertising revenue from companies whose market is national.
Two other collaborators of the political elite are the election management agencies and the judiciary at both the national and sub-national levels of government. The conspiracy between these agencies and the political elite is almost like that of Siamese twins conjoined by the belly button.
After the election management agencies may have deliberately bungled (especially) governorship and legislative house elections, and declared false reports, the losers, who felt that they won the election, would then approach the temple of justice, with significant financial inducement to ask for justice(?).
From that point on, the justice that both contestants hope to corruptly obtain could swing according to the heft of the naira in the Ghana-must-go bag that they will be hauling into the chambers of the denizens of the corrupted judiciary.
Thus, the “award” of electoral justice is “a matter of cash”, to quote Basi, the protagonist of “Basi & Co”, the television sitcom produced by environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who himself was denied justice from the judiciary that served the regime of General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s most notorious military dictator.
In Nigeria, the lines of separation of powers that demarcate the duties of the three arms of government –the legislative, executive and judiciary– and the checks and balances that empower each arm to check the others have become almost irredeemably blurred.
As legislators use constituency projects as a ploy to carry out the functions of the executive, the president issues executive orders that are essentially legislative in nature. Though the judiciary does not perform the duties of the other arms, it fails to check them as it indulgently winks at their excesses.
If those who are regarded as Nigeria’s political elite really know what is in their enlightened self-interest and would like to protect the future of their descendants from what Thomas Hobbes described as a short, brutish and nasty existence, they will use their current privilege to correct the evil they have done to Nigerians.
They must urgently redeem the future before it delivers violence against their children.
By Lekan Sote
In The Spotlight
Lagos alone is worth more than Botswana, Namibia, Rwanda and Mauritius combined.
Let that sink in.
With an economy of N41.17tn — about $102bn in 2021 — Lagos State dwarfed the entire gross domestic products of four countries. Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Delta and Bayelsa sit on oil wealth that funds nations. Ogun, Anambra and Imo churn out goods, services and commerce that would make small economies jealous.
By the numbers, Nigeria’s states are giants.
But walk the streets of Lagos, and you will still find mothers cooking with firewood. Drive through Port Harcourt, and you will see communities drinking water polluted by the same oil that makes the state’s GDP glow. Visit Umuahia, Abeokuta, or Minna and ask the average trader what “trillion-naira economy” means to her dinner table.
The answer is: nothing.
That viral video telling you “10 Nigerian states are richer than countries” is both true and a lie. True, because the 2021 BudgIT figures don’t lie — Lagos at N41.17trn, Rivers at N7.96trn, and so on. A lie, because those numbers are GDP, not prosperity. They measure how much economic activity happens _in_ a place, not how much of it reaches the people who live there.
A country with $7,778 GDP per capita, like Botswana, will still feed its citizens better than a state with $102bn in total output but $2,058 per capita, like Nigeria. A state can host a port, an oil rig, and a tech hub, yet fail to build a hospital that works.
So, the real question isn’t “Which state is bigger than which country?”
The real question, and the one our governors should lose sleep over, is this: When your economy is bigger than a nation, why are your people still living like they have nothing?
In this edition of The Bottomline, we follow the money from GDP to the gutter — and ask why Nigeria’s trillion-naira states have not become trillion-naira lives.
The viral numbers are not new. They were lifted straight from BudgIT’s 2022 State of States report and reflected 2021 estimates: Lagos at N41.17tn, followed by Rivers at N7.96tn, Akwa Ibom at N7.77tn, Imo at N7.68tn, Delta at N6.19tn, Anambra at N5.14tn, Ondo at N5.10tn, Ogun at N5.03tn, Bayelsa at N4.63tn and Niger at N4.58tn.
The trick is in the timing. To pitch those 2021 figures against 2025 country GDPs is statistical fraud. Nigeria has since rebased. The NBS moved the base year from 2010 to 2019, and the whole map shifted. Lagos itself has moved on: its 2025 _Lagos Economic Development Update_ puts the state at N43.06tn in 2023, with forecasts of N54.77tn for 2024 and N66.47tn for 2025. Those are projections, not fresh NBS post-rebasing observations, but they tell you the direction: up.
There is no debate that Lagos is Nigeria’s economic engine. From a colonial port to federal capital until 1991, it never lost momentum. Today, trade, manufacturing, ports, telecoms, tech, entertainment, real estate and finance all cluster in just 3,345 square kilometres. Compare that footprint to Botswana’s 581,730 sq km, Namibia’s 825,615 sq km, Rwanda’s 26,338 sq km, and Mauritius’ 2,040 sq km. Yet in 2021, Lagos’ $102 billion economy was several times larger than Botswana’s $19.9bn, Namibia’s $15.1bn, Rwanda’s $16.4bn, and Mauritius’ $16.2bn, according to 2025 World Bank figures.
That comparison is legitimate. The conclusion people draw from it is not.
GDP tells you how much value was produced in a territory. It does not tell you who owns it, who earns it, or whether the roads work, the lights stay on, or the hospital has drugs.
A state can run a trillion-naira economy and still have mothers boiling water on firewood. A country can have a smaller GDP and deliver a better life. Look at the per capita numbers: Botswana at $7,778, Namibia at $5,309, Mauritius at $11,819. Nigeria sits at about $2,058. Even Rwanda, at just $773 per capita, has pushed its $3-a-day poverty rate down to 38.6 per cent — proof that size is not destiny.
The oil states expose the fraud most brutally. Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Delta and Bayelsa rank high because petroleum inflates their GDP. But oil wealth does not flow into state coffers in equal measure, and it certainly does not flow into household wallets. BudgIT’s own fiscal sustainability index proves this. In 2022, Rivers topped overall fiscal performance despite Lagos having the biggest economy. A big economy without revenue discipline, jobs, and services is just a billboard.
Nigeria does not have a GDP problem. We have a translation problem.
We have pockets of enormous economic power. Lagos. Rivers. Akwa Ibom. Ogun. Anambra. Delta. The output is real. What is missing is the bridge between that output and ordinary life.
Until economic activity creates real jobs, until IGR rises and addiction to federal allocation falls, until infrastructure supports production instead of strangling it, those trillion-naira figures will remain a cruel joke.
So let the video go viral. Let Lagos be “bigger than Botswana”.
But governors, commissioners, and citizens should ask only one question:
If my state can outproduce a country, why can’t it out-deliver a decent life for the people who call it home?
Until we answer that, we are not rich. We are just big.
By Raphael Mbamalu