Former President of the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture and Chairman of the Alliance for Economic Research and Ethics Dele Oye has challenged the federal government’s self-assessment of its energy sector reforms, accusing a three-year review document released by the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Energy of systematically overstating achievements while concealing a 30.3 trillion naira internal debt crisis inside the Nigerian National Petroleum Company and ignoring the structural failure of the power sector to serve businesses and households.
Oye said the most revealing data point in the energy debate was not the government’s headline figures but the estimate that Nigerian companies spent approximately 1.83 trillion naira on diesel within just two months, a figure that he said reflected the persistent failure of grid electricity to serve the productive sector despite years of stated reforms. He said if businesses were spending that amount on self-generated power over such a short period while NNPC’s internal debts were ballooning, the effectiveness of the reforms must be honestly questioned.
He cited audited financial statements for NNPC’s 2024 fiscal year showing that intra-company debts among NNPC’s subsidiaries surged by 70.4 percent in a single year, from 17.78 trillion naira in 2023 to 30.3 trillion naira as of December 2024. He said the largest debtors were the state’s own refineries: the Port Harcourt Refining Company owed 4.22 trillion naira, the Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company owed 2.39 trillion naira, and the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company owed 2.06 trillion naira, all facilities that had absorbed billions of dollars in rehabilitation spending and remained largely non-functional. NNPC Trading SA owed the parent company 19.15 trillion naira, more than double the 8.57 trillion naira recorded the previous year.
He also noted that the World Bank had reported that NNPC remitted only 600 billion naira out of 1.1 trillion naira in post-subsidy revenues to the Federation Account in 2024, a shortfall of 500 billion naira. In December 2025, Tinubu approved the cancellation of 1.42 billion dollars and 5.57 trillion naira in legacy debts owed by NNPC to the Federation Account, which Oye said contradicted the government’s claims of fiscal discipline.
On the government’s claim to be Africa’s leading oil and gas investment destination, Oye acknowledged genuine improvement in the upstream investment environment and said the cited rise in Nigeria’s share of African upstream Final Investment Decisions from four percent to 40 percent was corroborated by the Africa Energy Chamber. However, he said FID announcements were corporate commitments to proceed, not capital disbursed, and that the historical gap between Nigerian FID announcements and actual capital deployment had been enormous. He said true energy sector reform had to be measured by kilowatt-hours delivered, barrels produced without condensate inflation, and naira saved through reduced generator dependence, not by the volume of presidential directives or bond structures.
