General
Senate Orders NDDC Interim Committee to Refund N4.9bn
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Senate ad-hoc committee probing matters of alleged financial recklessness in the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) has asked the Interim Management Committee (IMC) to refund the sum of N4.9 billion to the accounts of the commission.
During the course of the probe, the interim management had spent the money as an Extra Budgetary Expenditure including excesses like the COVID-19 relief fund, Lassa fever kit, scholarship grants, overseas travels, historically contracts and obligations and other expenses which were not captured in the NDDC’S budget.
These are part of the recommendations read out by the chairman of the committee, Mr Olubunmi Adetumbi, at the plenary session Thursday.
The Directive to refund the money is contained in the committee’s report submitted to the upper chamber which indicated frivolous spending and financial recklessness by the IMC.
Mr Adetumbi said the NDDC claimed to spend billions on medicals between October 2019 and May 2020. He also said the commission spent billions of naira on “overseas travel allowance” at a time when countries were on lockdown and international flights were not operating.
The report also recommended the dissolution of the committee and called for the reconstitution of a new management board by President Muhammadu Buhari.
It further recommended that oversight of the forensic audit should be transferred to the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation to ensure transparency. It urged the federal government to appoint a renowned auditor to supervise this forensic audit.
Lawmakers have also appealed for the quick adoption of these recommendations to alleviate the sufferings of people in the Niger Delta region, which the commission was set up to provide succour for.
The NDDC had been in the spotlight recently after the acting Managing Director of the NDDC, Mr Kemebradikumo Pondei, admitted that the commission spent N1.3 billion for staff as COVID-19 relief funds.
He made this statement at the investigative hearing on the N40 billion corruption allegation against the commission.
The Senate had on May 5 set up a seven-man ad-hoc committee to investigate the financial recklessness of the IMC.
Matters then took a dramatic turn earlier this week when Mr Pondei, who staged a walkout on the committee last week, slumped during the probe by the House of Representatives.
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
The new interim board of the Kaduna Electricity Distribution Company (KAEDC) has been inaugurated by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC).
The body was inaugurated by the regulator on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, pursuant to its intervention order issued recently.
NERC had, through Order No. NERC/2026/08, dissolved the board of directors of KAEDC following repeated failures to meet market obligations and other prescribed performance indices.
It subsequently constituted a five-member interim board of Special Directors, chaired by Mr Abdullahi Garba, for an initial period of one year, alongside an interim administrator, Mr Abubakar Umar Hashidu, appointed for an initial six-month period, to drive the reset of the distribution company.
The new team has been tasked to restore sanity into the energy distribution firm and deliver quality service to consumers within its franchise area.
It was gathered that shortly after the inauguration at midweek, a joint delegation of NERC, the newly inaugurated board, KAEDC’s management and staff paid a courtesy visit to the headquarters of One Division of the Nigerian Army in Kaduna.
At the military facility, the delegation was received by the General Officer Commanding and senior officers of the Division.
Thereafter, the team visited the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna, where the Commandant and principal officers of the military institution received them with open arms.
At both visits, discussions centred on ways to collaborate for better efficiency.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The chief executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), Mrs Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, has lamented the decline in Nigeria’s technical and commercial talent pipeline.
She canvassed for the rebuilding of the critical talent needs as renewed investment returns to the country’s energy sector after years of underinvestment.
According to her, Nigeria is facing a depleted pool of geoscientists, petroleum engineers and other critical technical professionals, largely as a result of a drop in investments that saw many capable hands jump ship.
She emphasised that Nigeria’s annual oil and gas investment, which stood at about $24 billion in 2014, had fallen to roughly $2 billion by 2023, representing a decline of more than 90 per cent over the period.
Mrs Eyesan, therefore, warned that the country could face a new constraint if investment accelerates faster than the development of the technical workforce required to execute complex upstream projects.
She said the prolonged investment contraction did not only affect capital spending and exploration activity but also triggered a corresponding erosion of human capital, with geoscientists among the first professionals to leave the industry when companies began cutting budgets.
Mrs Eyesan made the remarks during a panel session on Local Content & Human Capital under PIA 2021 & NOGICD, held on the second day of the Oil and Gas Trainers Association of Nigeria (OGTAN) Human Capacity Development Conference and Expo at the Petroleum Training Institute, Effurun, Delta State.
According to her, petroleum engineers were subsequently affected as the downturn deepened, with some made redundant while others were increasingly restricted to maintenance functions as operators moved from expansion to survival.
The official said the industry is now moving in the positive direction, with renewed investment and project development creating an urgent requirement for a new generation of highly specialised professionals.
The shift on her part is particularly significant following President Bola Tinubu’s Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Projects Incentives (Tax Remission) Order, 2026, signed on August 6, providing production tax credits for qualifying deep offshore project developments and is designed to improve the economics of projects reaching Final Investment Decision (FID) within the specified window.
Mrs Eyesan therefore warned that the country could face a new constraint if investment accelerates faster than the development of the technical workforce required to execute complex upstream projects.
The NUPRC boss had previously identified the skills deficit as a major consequence of the prolonged reduction in exploration activity, particularly affecting geologists.
She said renewed investment following the Petroleum Industry Act and business-oriented initiatives of the Tinubu administration was beginning to revive exploration, but warned that human capacity remained a major challenge.
Mrs Eyesan said Nigeria could no longer prepare oil and gas professionals using curricula designed primarily for an earlier generation of petroleum operations.
She identified digitised operations, advanced geoscience, digital twins and digital drilling technologies among the competencies that should now form part of the industry’s core workforce development strategy.
She disclosed that the transformation is significant because modern upstream projects increasingly depend on the ability to integrate subsurface data, real-time field information, automation, modelling and advanced analytics into investment and operational decisions.
For Nigeria, she said, the implication is that training institutions, operators, regulators and academia must move beyond simply replacing workers lost during the downturn.
They must build a workforce capable of operating the digital oilfield of the next investment cycle.
She said, “Training curricula need to evolve,” cautioning that Nigeria was still behind where it needed to be in developing the competencies required by a rapidly changing industry.
Mrs Eyesan also linked human capital development directly to Nigeria’s competitiveness for investment.
Using the analogy that capital behaves like water and flows towards areas of least resistance, she argued that Nigeria’s workforce must become more commercially oriented if the country is to capture greater value from the next wave of oil and gas investment.
She further explained that technical professionals increasingly need to understand the commercial consequences of their decisions, while commercial professionals need sufficient technical understanding to operate effectively within increasingly complex energy projects.
Mrs Eyesan further called for a fundamental change in how Nigeria approaches human capacity development, urging operators, regulators and training institutions to work more closely with universities and other academic institutions to establish a clear pathway for closing the existing skills gap.
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
The chairman of United Bank for Africa (UBA), Mr Tony Elumelu, expressed his displeasure over the way he was addressed by one of the company’s graduate trainees at an interactive session in a viral video.
The financial institution organised a Graduate Management Accelerated Programme graduation ceremony on Thursday, and the former banker was in attendance.
During a question-and-answer session, one of the graduating trainees stood and called Mr Elumelu by his first name, Tony.
“Good morning, Tony,” she said.
Mr Elumelu initially thought the lady meant to say Toyin, but she repeated “Good morning, Tony,” a development the UBA chairman was not happy about.
He quickly responded by saying, “No, you won’t call me Tony. You’ll call me Mr Elumelu or TOE. You won’t call me Tony, or Chairman. I don’t subscribe to that kind of… Oyinbo life, okay?”
Though without offering any apology for the error, the female graduate trainee subsequently corrected herself, saying, “Good morning, Mr Elumelu,” before proceeding with her question.
The video clip from the event has already generated mixed reactions, with many happy that the business mogul quickly rebuffed the lady.
They described her as rude, fearing she could lose her job for being disrespectful to the chairman of the organisation.
However, some others said calling colleagues by their first names in a corporate ecosystem is not new, as such happens in the banking sector.
