The Group Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Mele Kyari, says no public wealth creation endeavour can achieve any meaningful success without energy security.
He stated this in a presentation at the Ministry of Finance Incorporated Public Wealth Management Conference in Abuja on Tuesday, according to a statement issued by NNPCL spokesperson, Olufemi Soneye.
Kyari noted that all other wealth creating activities such as agriculture relied heavily on one form of energy or the other to thrive.
“If you don’t have energy, you don’t have agriculture. You can do all the agriculture but you can’t take it to the market, you may not be able to preserve it, you can’t even export it. So, all those indices are clearly connected to the ability to create energy,” he stated.
The NNPCL boss disclosed that Nigeria has a huge energy deficit with about 70 per cent of the population lacking access to clean cooking fuel and over 50 per cent lacking access to electricity.
He listed some of the impediments to the achievement of energy security in Nigeria to include lack of investment in the energy sector due to uncertainty in the business environment and multiple taxation.
Kyari stated that in the last 10 years, less than three per cent of the total investment flow into Africa came into Nigeria.
He, however, assured his listeners that NNPCL was working hard to lay the foundation for sustainable wealth creation by filling the energy deficit gap.
According to him, the company’s growth trajectory from a loss position of N803bn in 2018 to N2.5tn in 2022 was a testimony to the abundant potential of NNPCL to lead the process of wealth creation across the country.
He emphasised that in spite of the challenges, NNPCL was still the highest tax paying corporate entity in Nigeria.
On January 10, 2024, The PUNCH exclusively reported that NNPCL made a profit of N2.548tn in 2022, as the company described it as the “highest profit since the inception” of the national oil firm.
NNPCL is a state-owned oil corporation established in 1977 and the largest asset holder within the Nigerian oil and gas industry. It is currently commercially driven, a development that took effect after the passage of the Petroleum Industry Act by former President Muhammadu Buhari in August 2021.
The report stated that in a very concise one-page document, obtained from the oil firm in Abuja, titled, ‘NNPC Financial Performance,’ the company stated that it posted a loss of N803bn in 2018.
This reduced to N1.7bn loss in 2019, which was then followed by a jump to N287bn profit in 2020, while the company described this as its “turning point.”
In 2021, the oil firm’s profit grew to N674.1bn. It said this was “assurance,” adding that the profit continued to rise, hitting N2.548tn in 2022. The national oil firm said the N2.548tn was its “highest profit since inception.”
In November 2023, Kyari said the company was expecting over N2tn in its corporate profit after the release of its Annual Financial Statement for 2022.
