Deconstructing Diezani, Nigeria’s outgoing petroleum minister

For all the controversies she hugged, Diezani Allison-Madueke remained untouchable as Nigeria’s minister of petroleum resources, a position she held since 2010 after Goodluck Jonathan was confirmed acting president.

On the eve of her departure, this is an auspicious time to take a look at the profile of the woman who has held sway at the petroleum ministry, the sector responsible for over 80 percent of Nigeria’s revenue and over 95 percent of her foreign exchange earnings.

Diezani’s background may have prepared her for high profile appointments. She was born in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, to Chief Frederick Abiye Agama, a Shell executive and Beatrice Oyete Agama (née Porbeni), a nurse and midwife. Frederick Agama was reputed to be one of the leading figures instrumental to the creation of Bayelsa state.

Diezani studied architecture in England and then at Howard University in the United States. When she returned to Nigeria, she joined Shell Petroleum Development Company in 1992, starting out in the estates segment of Shell’s operations. In 2002, she attended Cambridge University for her MBA and rose through the ranks to become the first female executive director of Shell. In September 2011 Alison-Madueke was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Management Sciences by the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna.

Diezani emerged on Nigeria’s political terrain in July 2007, holding three significant positions, first as Transport Minister. By December 2008, she was named Minister of Mines and Steel Development. After Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan became acting President in February 2010, he dissolved the cabinet on March 17, 2010, and swore in a new cabinet on April 6, 2010 with Diezani Alison-Madueke emerging as Minister for Petroleum Resources.

After her appointment in 2011, the now defunct NEXT newspapers, in some of its reports, revealed that Diezani had back-dated her year of graduation from Howard University by five years to create the impression that she had some post-graduation work experience.

In June 2008, Alison-Madueke was the subject of a Senate probe after it emerged that as Transport Minister, she paid $263 million to contractors within the last five days of 2007 (between 26 and 31 December 2007) to rehabilitate the Benin-Shagamu expressway which remained as she met it by the time she left office.

Following the probe, the Senator Heineken Lokpobiri led ad-hoc committee on transportation, in 2009, indicted and recommended her for prosecution for the alleged transfer of N1.3billion into the private account of a toll company, Digital Toll Gates, without due process and in breach of concession agreement.

Upon assumption of duty as Minister of Petroleum Resources, Alison-Madueke pledged to transform Nigeria’s oil and gas industry so that all Nigerians would benefit through various reforms.

Under her watch, President Goodluck Jonathan signed the Nigerian Content Act in April 2010, a law which aims to increase the percentage of petroleum industry contracts that are awarded to indigenous Nigerian businesses, a response to the domination of the sector by foreign operators.

Perhaps that is a positive moment for Diezani whose tour of duty as petroleum minister is signposted by controversies. 

In 2010, Allison-Madueke moved the (then nine year old) Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) from the presidency into the petroleum ministry, directly under her watch. Between the period that the PPPRA was established in March 2001 and the end of 2009, the annual petroleum subsidy was between $3 billion and $4 billion. By the end of 2011, the annual subsidy cost went up to $9 billion.

Her first major step on a landmine was the controversial removal of petroleum subsidy in January 2012. Alison-Madueke pushed for the discontinuation of the subsidy on the ground that it “poses a huge financial burden on the government, benefits the wealthy disproportionately, and encourages inefficiency, corruption and diversion of scarce public resources away from investment in critical infrastructure.”

The move was stiffly resisted by Nigerians through the famous “Occupy Nigeria” demonstrations.

At various times, Allison-Madueke, had promised bid rounds that never saw the light of day. Operators in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry and other concerned stakeholders blamed her for the much trumpeted bid rounds for marginal oil fields that never held, along with her failure to explain the reason(s).

Under Diezani’s watch, International Oil Companies in Nigeria (IOCs) conducted divestment from about 21 acreages and she has seen out three successive heads of Department of Petroleum (DPR), the industry’s regulatory agency and fired four group managing directors of  the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

Perhaps the biggest controversy under her watch was the alleged squandering of N10 billion over a two-year period on the charter and maintenance of a Challenger 850 aircraft for official and unofficial use, which included the payment of allowances to the crew for the trips, hanger parking and rent, based on the lease agreement.

It was alleged that Alison-Madueke sank at least N3.120 billion into the maintenance of a private jet dedicated to the service of herself and her family; N130 million was spent every month on the maintenance of the airplane, which amounts to N3.120 billion for the two years in question.

The Mallam Nuhu Ribadu-led Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force set up by the Federal Government to recover oil revenues, in its 178-page report, indicted Allison-Madueke for handing out at least three of the seven discretionary oil licenses but did not account for $183million in signature bonuses. The Ribadu committee also reported that under Diezani’s watch, the NNPC gave out N700.5 million in loan to Sao Tome & Principe, based on instruction from the presidency.

In her running battles with the National Assembly, she was reputed to have treated legislative summons with disdain, and sometimes her appearances materialised only after she had been threatened with contempt summons.

In 2014, a Swiss- based non-governmental and advocacy organisation, Berne Declaration, also alleged that two Swiss oil trading companies–Vitol and Trafigura–in connivance with the NNPC, had ripped the country off  to the tune of about $6.8 billion in two years, which led to the joint Committee on Petroleum Resources (Downstream and Upstream) and Judiciary to summon Allison-Madueke over the alleged diversion of $8 billion meant for the Federal Government’s coffers. The $8 billion represents the under-declared amount in the crude oil swap deal.

Under Diezani’s watch, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) also accused some oil traders of under-delivering 500,075,239.3 litres of products worth $8 billion in year 2011.

Diezani is not just full of negative attributes; she had also scored some brilliant positive points. In October 2010 she became the first woman to head a country delegation at the annual Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) conference and in 2013; she was elected Alternate President of OPEC at the 164th meeting of the OPEC conference in Vienna, Austria.

However, her most shining moment was on November 27, 2014 when she got elected as the first female President of OPEC, with the media celebrating her many firsts; She was the first female executive director of Shell, Nigeria’s first female Minister of Transportation, first female Petroleum Minister of Nigeria, first female head of an OPEC country delegation to the annual OPEC Conference and first president, Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF).

Since 1999, Diezani has been married to Admiral Allison Madueke (rtd), a one-time Chief of Naval Staff who was at various times governor of Anambra and Imo states.

FRANK UZUEGBUNAM