Major Shake-up In NNPCL As MDs, About 200 Senior Staff Sacked

The Ojulari-led new management of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd), has sacked the Managing Directors of the company’s three refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna.

This was as some other top officials of the NNPC Ltd were also sacked and directed to leave.

Some of those affect in the major shake-up included, Mr Bala Wunti, former chief of the National Petroleum Investment Management Services, a subsidiary of NNPCL.

Similarly, the new management of the NNPC Ltd directed many of its staff with one year to their retirement dates to leave.

President Bola Tinubu had on April 2, 2025, sacked Mele Kyari, former Group Chief Executive Officer of the NNPC Ltd who had been at the helm of affairs of the NNPC Ltd since 2019.

It was gathered that the current shake-up was a performance-based reshuffle, as checks indicated that those previously in charge “were going in circles” and some of them had “become part of the problem, rather than the solution.”

Sources at the NNPC Ltd said that the continued poor performance of the refineries in spite of the humongous amount of resources spent on their rehabilitation contributed to the exit of the managing directors.

It was gathered that the NNPCL came under attacks as the $897m Warri refinery revamp flopped while that of the Port Harcourt refinery had been struggling at under 40 per cent production capacity which forced industry operators and experts to questioned the operational integrity of the NNPC Ltd with regards to transparency, efficiency, and overall management of Nigeria’s refineries under its purview.

This was after the revelation that the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company has remained shut since January 25, 2025, due to safety issues in its Crude Distillation Unit Main Heater.

An April 2025 document on the Midstream and Downstream sector obtained from the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority revealed that the refinery, which consumed $897.6m in maintenance costs, failed to produce Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) and was shut down barely a month after Kyari, the former NNPCL boss declared it operational.

This is as the Port Harcourt Refining Company, which resumed operations in November 2024, had been operating below 40 per cent capacity which Industry operators and experts described this as quite disheartening.