IN the past couple of months, OML 46, an oil bloc otherwise known as the Atala Marginal Oil Field, has been in the news for the wrong reasons. The news about the oil bloc which has become an official scandal rocking the Muhammadu Buhari administration, unfortunately comes in the twilight of his government.
Unfortunately, this is one scandal too many. Given the constitutional mandate as a journalist provided in Section 22 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, it will be a disservice to keep silent about the mind-boggling facts of corruption in the criminal revocation of OML 46 belonging to Bayelsa Oil Company Limited, BOCL, owned by the Bayelsa State government.
It is against this background that one is constrained to altruistically place the facts of the scandal in proper perspective for public scrutiny and hold accountable the influence of public office holders in the country. Without qualms, the protagonists at the centre of this whole saga are the Bayelsa born politician and Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, and one Dr. Kelechukwu Afoegbu, who is widely believed to be acting for Chief Timipre Sylva.
You recall that Dr. Afoegbu was the technical assistant of Chief Timipre Sylva and was grilled by the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges, and Public Petitions. He promised to furnish the committee with relevant documents backing the revocation and re-allocation of Atala to Halkin E & P, a company that was incorporated on September 5, 2019 with no single financial and technical track record.
Curious advocates have continued to ask the pertinent question: “How can a company claim to have developed a field that was already producing before its incorporation?” Prior to the events leading to the revocation of OML 46, ten oil blocs had their licenses revoked for inexplicable reasons, but were later reversed through a presidential order including OML 46. Interestingly, in spite of the presidential directive, a new twist to the effect of withholding the license of OML 46 was evidently hatched.
On March 8, 2021, an application to re-award OML 46 to Halkin E & P Nigeria Limited was sent to the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, and the same day, he gave his express approval, in breach of the earlier presidential directive. Just like adding salt to an injury, Chief Sylva, who unmasked himself as the big masquerade behind the conspiracy against the land of his birth, Bayelsa, while granting an interview to a Yenagoa based radio station in October, 2022 during his visit to empathise with the ravaging flood victims in his state.
Speaking on the controversially revoked license of the state-owned OML 46 – Atala Marginal Oilfield, which the people of Bayelsa State are sentimentally attached to as their prized asset; it was most shocking to hear their only ministerial representative in the Federal Cabinet speak to justify the revocation in unflattering terms and to some extent in a mocking tone, suggesting that the general outcry and efforts by the Diri administration to reverse the revocation were akin to crying over spilled milk. Bayelsans were disappointed and heartbroken to hear Sylva, their own son and former governor of the state, drive the final nail into the coffin of the Atala Oilfield debacle
with authority. According to one Samuel Ebiowo: “The unkindest cut was that this state of hopelessness was perpetrated with the obvious grand conspiracy under the supervision of a Bayelsa son”. According to Sylva in that radio interview, the Atala Oilfield licence was revoked 17 years after it was no longer productive; an oil bloc was allocated to the Bayelsa State government in 2003 by former President Olusegun Obasanjo to appease the people as an oil-producing state, following years of agitation for development. It was also essentially to boost the state’s internally generated revenue, IGR, create jobs, and address its infrastructure concerns.
It is a sad commentary that it is a son of the state that is pushing hard to deprive his people of this prized asset in pursuit of his self-serving interests, as evident in his open interview. If Sylva says the Atala oil bloc was revoked because it was unproductive, the questions that beg for honest answers from Chief Timpre Sylva are: Did the Bayelsa Oil Company Limited, BOCL, and its partners, Century Exploration and Production Limited and Hardy Oil Nigeria Limited, not pay royalties to the Federal Government, the NUPRC (former Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR)?
Did the NUPRC (DPR) receive the sum of $110,269.45 as oil royalty for Atala OML 46 for the sale of 64,283 barrels of crude oil from Century Exploration on behalf of Bayelsa Oil Company Limited (BOCL) on November 27, 2018? Did the NUPRC (DPR) not issue a receipt for $15,695.54 as royalty for OML 46 on the same date for the sale of 17,699 barrels of crude oil to Century Exploration on behalf of BOCL?
Between March and June 2018, did the Atala Marginal Oilfield produce 87,411 barrels of oil as stated in the DPR production data? If OML 46 was not productive as Chief Sylva claimed as one of his flimsy excuses, what was the oil royalty amounting to $125, Should the Federal government not then refund to Bayelsa State such monies collected for an oilfield it claimed was not productive?
Did the Bayelsa Oil Company Limited and its joint venture partners not pay to DPR the sum of $12, 000 that was the outstanding National Data Repository Annual Fee for six years (2014–2019) on January 15, 2020? Did DPR not receive the sum of $31,827.88 as outstanding crude oil royalty payments and a gas flared payment of $2,752.31 from the same Bayelsa Oil Company Limited, BOCL, and its partners on the same date?
If nothing was fishy, why revoke the OML 46 license, just a few months after collecting all these monies as royalties. It is pertinent to also ask why Sylva could not make Atala Oil productive while he served as governor of the state for five years. Is it not an indictment against him? After all, he had twice appointed Managing Directors for BOCL with no success.
Why then blame your successors while you did nothing to make the state owned oilfield productive. Why did Sylva, curiously advise the Bayelsa State government during his radio interview to jettison the Atala Oilfield and focus on the yet-to-be tapped OPL (now PPL) 240, which he claimed to be bigger and more lucrative.
Bayelsans and Nigerians in general are awaiting better answers from the Bayelsa Ministerial Representative, who is working against his own people. As a matter of fact, the general opinion is that Sylva did it out of malice, by taking his pound of flesh from the people of Bayelsa State over an incident that occurred years ago when he was publicly stoned with sachet water and sticks while he was addressing a political gathering as governor of the state seeking re-election. That public stoning, which marked the height of rejection by his people, culminated in the event leading to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, denying him the platform to seek re-election.
According to a Yenagoa based commentator on public affairs, Mr. Peretimi Martin: “Sylva should not take Bayelsans for granted. His ministerial appointment should be seen as an opportunity to redeem his image in the state.
Sam, a social commentator, wrote from Yenagoa, Bayelsa State