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NNPC board: Tail shouldn’t wag the dog! *Avuru qualified to be CEO – PANDEF
There is no credible reason for the Niger Delta to continue playing second fiddle in the leadership of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited given its ownership of the oil and gas deposits for which the company was set up in the first place.
This was the position of the Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF), on Thursday in reaction to the constitution of a new board as announced by President Bola Tinubu on Wednesday, with both the offices of the Chairman of Board and the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (MD-CEO) going elsewhere outside the region.
The regional body, which champions the interest of the oil-rich zone and Nigeria’s goose that lays the golden egg, argued that overlooking it despite the abundance of its abundant human resources in the oil and gas sector of the Nigerian economy, for the choice of the leadership of the company was akin to the tail wagging the dog.
Godknows Igali, PANDEF Chairman, told ARISE NEWS Network, while appearing on Prime Time, its public affairs programme that the relegation of the area despite its strategic position as the owners of Nigeria’s oil and gas, had remained quite worrisome.
Hear him: “Our representation, we don’t think it is fair to us. It is not fair to us because the oil, the gas, the natural resources in the oil and gas industry are produced in the Niger Delta, and there is no part of this country that has the amount of human resources in the oil and gas industry as the Niger Delta.
“Mind you, because this is a resource in our part of the country, University of Benin, University of Port Harcourt, University of Calabar – they started the relevant disciplines quite a long time ago. Even our people that went to universities abroad before then, focused on oil and gas. So, the core of professionals in the sector are from the area.
“Good, we have one of the most qualified people, Austin Avuru as an Executive Director. But if you look at the rating, he could have as well been the Group Managing Director. The point we’re making is that the days when you say we don’t have people are not there. There are qualified people.
“They can’t always want us to play from outside. Besides upstream, besides actual production, there are a number of issues – community issues, environmental issues – that it is only somebody who is from there that can smell the coffee – that can bring other factors to play.
“So, the persistent keeping out of the people of the Niger Delta from the core management of the NNPC does not augur well. It is not fair, it is not just, it is not a good way to promote proper inclusion of our people. It is a consistent policy of exclusion.
“Sometimes, some of us think it is deliberate to leave our people out. You don’t do this to people of the other parts of the country – for a period that we are not having the top, this continues to occur. But we’ll keep talking, because it is not fair. If we don’t have the people, its different. We have the critical mass of the professionals in the sector.
“So, why do you always leave them with auxiliary positions or a Minister of State position that is more or less a position of a placeholder. Even the position of a substantive Minister does not exist. You have a Minister of State for Gas, a Minister of State for Oil, who don’t have any substantive functions – just general policy issues – because you’re neither the Minister nor the proper Chief Executive of the industry.”
Igali, who admitted that things were different during the tenure of Goodluck Jonathan as President, because the area produced the substantive Minister, he said such a development would always create the required balance because Ministers had executive capacity not only to influence policies, but break all the other prevailing factors.
“But when you don’t have a substantive Minister, you don’t have a substantive member in the executive management of the sector, you’re excluded, Igali said, warning that the issue of environmental remediation of the region would continue to resonate for as long as there remained the absence of an intentional policy of the Nigerian government to the problem.
As the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) prepares to elect its next set of national officers on Saturday, July 18, the process has been troubled by court battles, an unprecedented intervention from the office of the attorney-general of the federation, allegations of bias against the association’s leadership, and disputes over zoning arrangements.
This has turned what should have been a routine internal election into one of the most contested election processes in the NBA’s recent history.
With over 82,000 lawyers across 139 branches of the NBA eligible to vote, three senior advocates (SANs) running for the presidency, and legal challenges still pending hours before polls open, the outcome — whether it will be broadly accepted across the profession — remains genuinely uncertain.
HOW IT STARTED
The process for the 2026 election formally began at a national executive council meeting in Edo state on November 20, 2025, where a five-member Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA) was approved, chaired by Aham Ejelam, SAN, with Ibrahim Aliyu Nassarawa as secretary.
Section 10(1) of the NBA’s 2015 Constitution (amended 2025) establishes the ECNBA as an independent body that runs elections for the association’s national offices and for NBA representatives on the General Council of the Bar.
By June 18, the ECNBA had cleared 35 candidates to contest the various national offices, with three senior advocates emerging as presidential contenders: Olumuyiwa Akinboro of the Abuja branch, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya (the only woman among recent presidential candidates) of the Lagos branch and Lateef Akangbe, also of Lagos.
COURT CASES/ZONING TENSIONS
Trouble surfaced early. On March 4, Gabriel Opayinka, judge of the Oyo state high court, granted an interim order restraining the NBA from taking further steps toward the election, and barring Afam Osigwe, NBA president, from constituting or supervising the ECNBA. The order came following a suit filed by four lawyers — Ibrahim Lawal, Raymond Oki, Omotan Olusola Ogunmodede and Chief Gabriel Ojo Adekunle Ijalana — challenging the legitimacy of the process. In the suit, the applicants contested the legitimacy of the electoral process and the role allegedly played by the NBA leadership in the composition of the ECNBA.
Also, Egbe Amofin O’odua, an association of lawyers of Yoruba extraction, has been pushing for Akinboro to be adopted as the sole western-zone candidate, arguing that he is the zone’s consensus choice.
On February 24, Y. S. Adekunle, the presiding judge, granted an interim injunction barring the NBA from recognising or processing nominations outside the Yoruba lawyers’ consensus candidate arrangement for the presidency.
CALLS FOR OSIGWE’S RESIGNATION
Weeks before the courts got involved, the dispute had already turned personal. At an NEC meeting in Maiduguri, Borno state, on February 5, Akinboro and Akangbe, candidates vying for the presidential office, accused Osigwe of bias. They alleged that the NBA president, while responding to concerns raised over campaign materials being distributed at the venue, declared he could not remain neutral in the election because he holds voting rights as a member. In a letter dated February 15 to the NBA board of trustees, the two candidates cited that remark, along with what they called a pattern of partisan conduct, as grounds to demand Osigwe’s immediate resignation.
AGF’S ‘INTERVENTION’
The dispute heightened after Lateef Fagbemi, attorney-general of the federation (AGF), allegedly issued a directive that the election be pushed from July into August. A document said to contain a sub-committee report and comments attributed to Fagbemi, which circulated online, reportedly went further by calling for the ECNBA to be disbanded, its election technology vendor replaced, a caretaker committee installed, NIN verification introduced, and even the NBA constitution altered to curtail universal suffrage.
However, Osigwe rejected the intervention outright. In a statement, he argued that only the NBA’s national executive council has constitutional power to alter or suspend the election, and described the alleged directives as unconstitutional and beyond the AGF’s authority.
The NBA also defended its election vendor and said its own risk assessment had found that introducing NIN verification at this stage could disrupt the vote, partly because the national identity database might not handle the surge in authentication requests.
As tensions built, a document falsely claiming the election had been suspended began circulating and had to be publicly debunked by the ECNBA, which said it had no connection to the AGF’s office.
On July 14, the court of appeal, Ibadan division, set aside Opayinka’s interim order, which restrained the association from taking further steps towards the election.
In a unanimous judgement, a three-member panel of the appellate court held that the Oyo state high court never had jurisdiction to hear it in the first place. The appellate court held that jurisdiction is foundational to any judicial proceeding and that everything built on a jurisdiction-less order, including the injunction that had restrained the ECNBA and Osigwe, was void. The appeal had been brought by ECNBA chairman Aham Ejelam and other committee members against the four lawyers who filed the original suit, as well as against Osigwe and others.
WHERE THINGS STAND
With voting just one day away, the ECNBA has confirmed a final register of 82,213 eligible voters across 139 branches, published on July 10. The committee has repeatedly said the July 18 date is fixed and that there is no legal barrier to proceeding and said election observers, including the Department of State Services (DSS), the Nigeria Police Force, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), are expected to monitor the process from a central control room at the NBA’s Abuja secretariat.
Voting is due to run electronically from midnight to 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, with results expected Sunday.
Culled from TheCable
By Ken Harries Esq
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others,” observed Jonathan Swift. Every generation encounters leaders who solve today’s problems, but far fewer produce leaders who design tomorrow’s possibilities. The true measure of visionary leadership lies in the ability to recognise opportunities long before they become obvious, to imagine possibilities where others see only limitations, and to lay foundations whose full significance may not be appreciated until years later. History’s greatest builders are remembered not merely for the projects they completed, but for the future they envisioned before anyone else believed it was possible.
The true measure of visionary leadership lies not in the number of projects conceived, but in the ability to understand how seemingly unrelated sectors of the economy can reinforce one another to produce lasting prosperity. That was the deeper story behind Senator Godswill Akpabio’s presentation at the 2nd South South Economic Summit in Asaba in April 2012.
Many remember the address for its most celebrated proposal—the Ibom Deep Seaport. Yet the speech revealed something far more profound: a philosophy of development that viewed infrastructure not as isolated monuments, but as interconnected instruments of economic prosperity and social transformation.
That philosophy permeated virtually every aspect of the presentation. It was evident in aviation. At a time when aircraft maintenance in Nigeria depended almost entirely on foreign facilities, Akpabio announced plans for what he described as West Africa’s first Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) facility alongside the Akwa Ibom International Airport. Once again, the objective was not merely to construct another public facility. It was to retain within Nigeria the economic value, technical expertise, and skilled employment that routinely left the country whenever aircraft were serviced abroad.
Long before expressions such as local value addition, industrial self-reliance, and reducing capital flight became part of mainstream policy discussions across Africa, those ideas had already found practical expression in the development strategy he articulated in Asaba.
Even his brief remarks on state policing now possess remarkable contemporary relevance. Years before today’s broad national consensus that Nigeria’s security architecture requires fundamental reform, he argued that governors could not reasonably be held fully accountable for security while operational control remained centralised. Over time, national debate has steadily moved closer to the position he advanced.
Vision, however, should never be mistaken for perfection. Every transformative project encounters obstacles—financing constraints, regulatory hurdles, political transitions, implementation delays, and public controversy. The Ibom Deep Seaport has experienced each of these realities. When Governor Udom Emmanuel renamed the project from the Ibaka Deep Seaport to the Ibom Deep Seaport, many perceived the change as accompanying a relocation of the proposed site from Ibaka in Mbo Local Government Area to a coastal location in Ibeno Local Government Area. Government maintained that the final location emerged from rigorous technical evaluation, but the episode illustrated how even the most carefully conceived projects can become entangled in local sensitivities and competing interests.
Yet the endurance of the underlying idea is precisely what makes the original vision remarkable.
Governments changed. Political actors came and went. Debates arose and subsided. But the central economic concept endured. The Federal Executive Council approved the project’s business case in 2015, and successive administrations have continued to advance it under the Ibom Deep Seaport name. Good ideas possess a resilience that often outlives the administrations that first conceive them.
Therein lies perhaps the greatest lesson of the Asaba address. Vision is not measured by how loudly it is proclaimed, but by how far ahead it sees. History’s greatest builders were rarely those who merely responded to the demands of their own generation and time. They were those who imagined opportunities others could not yet see and laid foundations whose full value would only be appreciated years later.
Nigeria’s development story will ultimately belong not only to those who completed great projects, but also to those who first conceived them. The true legacy of public leadership is not merely the structures that rise from the ground, but the ideas that continue to shape a nation’s future long after the speeches have ended and the applause has faded. Judged by that standard, the Akpabio’s Asaba address remains an enduring lesson in visionary leadership.
•Ken Harries Esq is an Abuja based development Communication Strategist
The echoes of the drums rolled out to celebrate the rescue of the 44 teachers and students, kidnapped from some schools in Oyo State, after 56 days in the bush, would surely be disrupted abruptly, with the divergent echoes of a fresh abduction, this time coming from Kogi State.
Reports indicate that the gunmen, struck on Tuesday at the Government Secondary School, Odo-Ekina, in Dekina Local Government Area of the state, abducting four students, the school principal and a National Examinations Council (NECO) ad hoc staff member.
Authorities of the Kogi State Police Command, who immediately unleashed their operatives in hot pursuit of the abductors, said the attack occurred at about 5:25 p.m. while the students were writing their NECO examination.
Saliu Oyiza Afusat, an Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) and spokesman of the command, said a combined team of police personnel and other security agencies has launched a search-and-rescue operation following the incident.
Informing that one of the students was actually rescued immediately, she said efforts were ongoing to secure the release of the remaining victims and apprehend the attackers, adding that Naziru Bello Kankarofi, the state Commissioner of Police, alongside the Brigade Commander and the State Security Adviser to the Governor, Commodore Jerry Omodara (Rtd), were already on the way to the scene for an on-the-spot assessment.
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