By The confession is written on the face of the Board’s own papers. In February 2024, the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board under its Executive Secretary, Felix Omatsola Ogbe, spent N173,108,826 on end-of-year gifts, oil for the staff and rice for the stakeholders, and the records of the Board itself show that the contracts were awarded first and the approval chased afterward, when there was nothing left to approve but a deed already done.
SecretsReporters investigation into the Board’s records has unearthed the first of the two papers, dated February 1, 2024, by which Olby Global Resources Limited took N90,609,354 for the supply of the oil gifts. The paper is not an ordinary request for approval. It is titled, in the Board’s own words, “Request for approval for the ratification of the award of contract”, an open admission that the award had already been made and that what was being sought was a blessing after the fact.
The second paper carries the same date and the same confession in its title. By it, Blankso Nigeria Limited received N82,499,472 for the rice shared to stakeholders as end-of-year gifts, and it too is a request for approval for the ratification of an award of contract already concluded. Two contracts, one day, N173,108,826 in gifts, and not one approval in place before either award was sealed.
The Public Procurement Act 2007 fixes the order of things without any room for argument: procurement approval is secured first, and only then is an award made. The two NCDMB papers of February 1, 2024 run that order backwards. The money was committed, the contractors were engaged, the gifts were shared, and the paperwork trailed behind to ratify what had already happened, converting the approval the law demands at the start into a ceremony performed at the end.
Neither company is a phantom. Olby Global Resources Limited stands on the Corporate Affairs Commission register as RC 1051163, registered in 2012, with active status. Blankso Nigeria Limited stands as RC 799447, registered in 2009, also active. The scandal is not that the companies exist. It is that a Board funded with public money handed them N173,108,826 in contracts first and went looking for the authority to do so only after the awards were beyond recall.
This is the Board charged with policing how Nigeria’s oil and gas wealth is spent on Nigerian content, the regulator other operators answer to on the propriety of their own contracting. Under Ogbe, who took over the Board in December 2023, its own house ran on ratification: end-of-year oil for the staff, end-of-year rice for the stakeholders, and an approval file opened when the sharing was already complete.
