NNPCL’s new corporate culture of transparency, accountability driving numbers, discipline
For decades, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company was the black box of the nation’s economy. Revenues flowed in, deductions went out, and only a handful of insiders could explain how the numbers moved. Public complaints about opacity swirled constantly, and mistrust hardened into a national reflex.
That posture is beginning to shift. The turning point is not a press release or a slogan, but a decision that would have been unthinkable in the past: publishing audited financial statements, holding an earnings call, and inviting analysts to interrogate the books. One of those analysts was Mr. Victor Eromosele, a former Chief Financial Officer and presently Chairman of M.E Consulting Limited.
His breakdown of the 2024 numbers is now shaping the wider conversation about whether NNPCL has truly entered a new era of transparency and accountability.
“When I read the report, the first thing I did was convert everything to dollars”
Speaking on Arise TV, Mr. Eromosele explained that he approached the numbers with a method rooted in transparency and comparability. The naira had swung wildly, and a nominal reading of the company’s N45.1 trillion revenue and N5.4 trillion profit would distort any serious analysis.
“The first thing I did was to convert it to the United States (US) dollars because we all know what has happened to the naira recently,” he said. “If you look at it in dollars you would find out that the top line instead of N4.5 trillion is actually 31.1 billion dollars. The bottom line instead of N5.4 trillion is actually 3.7 billion dollars.”
He explained why this mattered. Converting the numbers allowed him to compare performance across years using a stable baseline and, more importantly, to compare NNPCL with its global peers. “NNPCL seeks to be a globally competitive energy company and so you have to compare,” he noted.
Comparing NNPCL with Chevron and ENI
Once the figures were placed in dollars, Mr. Eromosele examined NNPCL alongside Chevron and ENI, Italy’s national oil company. The contrast in scale was expected. Chevron posted 193 billion dollars in revenue; ENI, 198.7 billion dollars. NNPCL’s 31.1 billion dollars is a fraction of those numbers.
But raw size was not the metric he cared about. The real test, he said, was efficiency.
NNPCL recorded 3.7 billion dollars in profit. Chevron delivered 17 billion dollars; ENI, 6 billion dollars. When Mr. Eromosele calculated profit margins, the result surprised even him. “If you compared the bottom line with that of the top line which is the margin, you would find a situation where NNPCL for example is at 11.8 percent, while ENI is at 6 percent and Chevron is at 9 percent,” he said.
His conclusion was blunt: “Looking at the figures, it shows NNPCL did better. From that perspective of financial efficiency, we would see that NNPCL had superior profit margins.”
This is the kind of comparative insight that old-era NNPC never invited. It was exactly the fog the new structure under the Petroleum Industry Act was meant to clear.
Asset growth, capital discipline and why listing now makes sense
The analyst went further. He examined asset growth, a key indicator of whether a company is expanding sustainably. NNPCL, he found, recorded 56 percent asset growth. In a sector that had struggled with underinvestment for years, he considered this “significant.”
He also addressed the persistent public question of why NNPCL has not yet been listed on the stock exchange. Serious investors measure the health of a company by return on capital employed. According to Mr. Eromosele, NNPCL returned 28 percent in 2024, up from 23 percent the previous year.
“What was NNPCL’s return on capital employed? NNPCL had 28 percent, and that was quite healthy,” he said.
In markets around the world, a company that posts consistent returns above 20 percent is considered investment-grade in efficiency and capital deployment.
For an organisation that for years operated with quasi-fiscal burdens and political distractions, these indicators speak to a cultural shift. Capital discipline has become part of the new identity.
The broader transparency story
Mr. Eromosele’s analysis fits into a wider narrative emerging around NNPCL’s reforms. The company no longer operates as the government’s opaque revenue collector. Under the new model, it sells crude, then pays taxes, royalties, and dividends separately and explicitly. This structure is cleaner, auditable, and easier for bodies like NEITI to verify.
Equally important, the company now publishes IFRS-compliant audited accounts. These documents create a permanent record that cannot be adjusted by political interpretation. For a firm that once resisted visibility, this is a radical departure.
Mr. Eromosele put it simply: the numbers show a company behaving more like the global players it says it wants to compete with.
A company judged on performance, not sentiment
None of this means NNPCL’s transformation is complete. But the numbers, the comparisons, and the disclosures paint a picture that is no longer defined by opacity and speculation.
In Mr. Eromosele’s words, once you strip away the currency noise and assess the company on a global level playing field, “one can say NNPCL actually did well.”
For a company that spent years as the symbol of mistrust in Nigeria’s public financial system, this shift is more than a statistical win. It marks the beginning of a new era where the national energy company wants to be scrutinized, measured, compared, and judged in the open. If the old NNPC belonged to the shadows, the new NNPCL is choosing the light.
