For the fourth consecutive time, Mr. Bayo Ojulari, Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), refused to honour the summons of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts to respond to the audit query raised against the company.
At the Tuesday, July 23, 2025 sitting of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts chaired by Senator Aliyu Wadada, Ojulari outrightly ignored the invitation extended to him, a development that seriously irked members of the Committee.
Accordingly, the Senate Committee granted the NNPC Ltd GCEO one more chance to appear before it unfailingly on Wednesday, July 24, 2025, or face sanction.
Before Tuesday’s panel sitting, three invitations were sent to Ojulari to appear before it to explain the unaccounted N210 trillion expenditure raised in the 2017 to 2023 audit report of the Auditor-General for the Federation against the NNPC Ltd.
However, at the resumed sitting of the committee on Tuesday, its chairman asked the Clerk, Mohammed Abdullahi, if Ojulari was present in order to appear before the panel for which he responded that the NNPC Ltd GCEO sent a letter explaining his absence.
Ojulari, in the letter dated July 22, and read by the Committee’s clerk, claimed that the urgent invitation from President Bola Tinubu about 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday prevented him from honouring the committee’s invitation.
Members of the committee, in their separate comments, expressed reservations on the genuineness of the reason given by the GCEO, as one of the members of the committee, Senator Aminu Abbas noted that Ojulari has failed to understand that no GCEO of the NNPC Ltd was bigger than the National Assembly.
He said; “For failing to honour the invitations of this committee four different times, he should be ordered to appear before the committee tomorrow (Wednesday) unfailingly”.
Speaking in turn, Senator Victor Umeh, said that even though a presidential call had reduced his anger against the NNPCL boss, he however, said that using Mr. President as an excuse for failing to appear before the committee should not be allowed to continue.
In his own contribution, Senator Joel Thomas Onowakpo accused Ojulari of not taking the invitation of the committee as a priority, stressing that the NNPCL boss thinks that he is bigger than the committee.
In his words; “We don’t need a soothsayer to tell us that he will never honour our invitation except we invoke our powers to compel him”.
