Remembering Kweku Amafegha and the saga of OPL 245, By Osmund Agbo

He smiled, extended his hand and clasped mine firmly. “My name is Kweku,” he said, with the quiet assurance of a man entirely at ease in his own skin. The name struck me as familiar. I was certain I had heard it before, yet I could neither place the location nor summon the circumstances of our supposed acquaintance. I mentally ran through the catalogue of my Ghanaian friends and acquaintances and none was Kweku. For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether I was experiencing some peculiar déjà vu.

It took several hours for the memory to return. And when it did, it came back with startling clarity. I remembered exactly where and how I had encountered Mr. Kweku Amafegha. The reason the recollection had been so elusive was because we had not met him in the conventional sense in which we meet people. What I had encountered was a name, a corporate identity, on paper. Yet that seemingly innocuous name was attached to something far more consequential: one of the most valuable pieces of Nigeria’s real estate, located 150 kilometer off the coast of Niger Delta. And that, dear friends, is where the story becomes interesting.

Every Nigerian, young or old, deserve to know the story about Kweku Amafegha, Malabu Oil & Gas, and OPL 245. Not merely because of the extraordinary wealth associated with the oil block, but because the story offers an almost perfect distillation of how Nigeria’s greatest natural endowment became an inexhaustible feeding trough for the political and economic elite. But before we throttle forward, perhaps we should back up a little.

Nigeria struck commercial quantities of crude oil in 1956 when Shell BP discovered oil at Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa State. By 1958, commercial exploration and export had begun. What followed was the transformation of Nigeria into a petro-state, a country whose economic fortunes would become overwhelmingly tethered to the black gold beneath its soil and waters.

Yet there was an irony at the heart of this newfound prosperity. Although the oil belonged, constitutionally and morally, to the Nigerian people, the expertise, capital and machinery required to extract it remained overwhelmingly foreign. NNPC, created decades later, was principally an instrument for managing Nigeria’s interests in joint ventures and other petroleum arrangements. Independence had arrived, but in the oil industry, the architecture of dependency remained largely intact.

Then came the military era of General Ibrahim Babangida. In 1993, his administration introduced the Indigenous Exploration Programme (IEP),an initiative intended to encourage Nigerian participation in petroleum exploration and production. Among other things, it lowered the barriers to entry for indigenous operators by introducing a concessionary signature bonus of about $20 million for local players seeking Oil Prospecting Licences.

It was, at least in conception, an important attempt to Nigerianise the ownership and control of the country’s petroleum industry. Some of the earlier beneficiaries would go on to become members of Nigeria’s billionaire class. They included Mohammed Ndimi of Oriental Energy Resources, Mike Adenuga of Consolidated Oil and Folorunso Alakija of Famfa Oil. You may have noticed that no Igbo name appears on that roll call. But I digress.

When General Sani Abacha seized power, he continued the policy of indigenous participation and awarded several additional oil blocks. Among the beneficiaries was Sapetro, associated with General Theophilus Danjuma.

And then there was OPL 245.

That name would eventually become synonymous with one of the most labyrinthine and controversial petroleum transactions in Nigerian history. On April 29, 1998, Abacha’s government awarded OPL 245 to a newly registered, little-known company called Malabu Oil & Gas Limited.

The circumstances surrounding that award would later become the subject of investigations and litigation spanning several countries. But the real intrigue begins with the question: Who actually owned Malabu? Enter Kweku Amafegha.

Kweku Amafegha was presented as the majority shareholder of Malabu Oil & Gas, but there was a problem: the man did not exist. He appeared to be a phantom. The name existed only on paper, though the identity behind the many pseudonyms would later be unmasked.

According to the CAC filings from the time OPL 245 was awarded to Malabu Oil in 1998, the reported shareholders were Mohammed Sani, also known as Mohammed Abacha, with 10 million shares (50%); Kweku Amafegha, also known as Dan Etete, with six million shares (30%); and Wabi Hassan, identified as Alhaji Adamu Hassan, then Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United States, with four million shares (20%). Pause for a moment and contemplate the audacity of that arrangement.

A sitting petroleum minister, working with the son of the head of state, allegedly overseeing the allocation of a colossal national asset to a company whose beneficial ownership was obscured behind a mysterious identity? Did Minister Etete, in effect, award a substantial piece of Nigeria’s patrimony to himself and his associates behind a corporate veil? I have no idea, of course. What I do know is that Mohammed Abacha, son of the late military dictator, has long alleged that Etete, operating under the name Kweku Amafegha, fraudulently altered the CAC filings and effectively took over his stake in Malabu Oil & Gas.

At this point, I will resist the temptation to connect the dots that the reader can connect for himself. Instead, let us examine the prize. 

OPL 245 lies approximately 150 kilometres offshore in the Niger Delta. By 2006, estimates suggested that the block contained roughly one billion barrels of recoverable oil. A 2018 projection by Resources for Development Consulting estimated potential revenues of between $9.8 billion and $15.6 billion to Nigeria’s Federation Account over the life of the project. At full production, the block was projected to contribute as much as 150,000 barrels of crude per day to Nigeria’s output. By any reasonable measure, this was not an ordinary asset. It was a national treasure buried beneath the Atlantic.

Yet Malabu Oil & Gas Limited acquired the block for a reported $2.2 million, an amount that was itself a fraction of the concessionary signature bonus associated with indigenous operators. Years later, the transaction involving Shell, Eni and others would ultimately see approximately $1.3 billion paid in connection with the settlement and acquisition of interests in the block. That is the kind of arithmetic that should make an oil-producing nation sit upright. But Nigeria did not sit upright.

Instead, the saga became an endless carousel of approvals, revocations, litigation and political manoeuvring till this day. Successive administrations, from Olusegun Obasanjo to Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari, became entangled in one form or another with the controversy. Courts in Nigeria, Italy, the United Kingdom and elsewhere were drawn into the dispute.

The OPL 245 saga is therefore not merely a story about one oil block. It is a story about a country that repeatedly discovered the same thing: that the closer you look at the management of its oil wealth, the more difficult it becomes to determine where public patrimony ends and private enrichment begins. And that brings us back to NNPC.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a state-owned oil company. Saudi Arabia has one. Norway has one. Brazil has one. The question is not whether the state should participate in the petroleum industry. The question is whether the institution entrusted with that responsibility is sufficiently transparent, commercially disciplined and accountable to the citizens whose resources it controls. This is where Nigeria’s record becomes abysmal.

For decades, NNPC operated behind an almost impenetrable veil of opacity. PremiumTimes reported years ago that the corporation went 43 years without publishing audited financial statements. Its first publicly released audited accounts covered 2018 and were published in 2020. Even after its transformation into NNPC Limited, questions about receivables, cash-flow constraints, deductions and the company’s financial obligations have continued to generate controversy.

And then there is the refinery saga. For decades, Nigerians were told that our refineries were undergoing Turnaround Maintenance, or TAM. Billions were repeatedly appropriated for rehabilitation. Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna became familiar names in a national ritual of promises, contracts, ceremonies and commissioning announcements. Yet the refineries remained unreliable or dormant for years.

One widely cited estimate placed the cumulative expenditure on refinery rehabilitation at roughly $25 billion over about a quarter of a century, even as the facilities remained largely moribund as recently as 2020. Imagine the absurdity.

This is why Nigeria’s oil story cannot be reduced to the misdeeds of a few individuals. The deeper problem is institutional. It is the absence of consequences.

It is the ability to take public resources, allow investigations to drag for years, litigate across continents, change governments, change policies and wait for the public to become exhausted.

Which is why Saudi Arabia offers an interesting, if imperfect, counterpoint.

On the night of November 4, 2017, Saudi authorities, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, detained dozens of the kingdom’s most powerful princes, businessmen and former officials at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. Among those detained were billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, then head of the Saudi National Guard, Prince Turki bin Abdullah, former governor of Riyadh, as well as prominent businessmen and former officials.

The Saudi government presented the purge as an anti-corruption campaign.

Critics argued that it was also a mechanism through which the young crown prince eliminated competing centres of power and consolidated his authority. Both things can be true.

Whatever one thinks of the methods, the Saudi state eventually announced that settlements from the campaign had yielded roughly $100 billion worth of assets and funds for the kingdom.

Now compare that with Nigeria. Where are the equivalent settlements? Where is the reckoning? Where are the recovered billions? Where are the confiscated properties, offshore accounts, corporate interests and other assets acquired through the systematic looting of public resources? More importantly, where is the institutional machinery capable of making such recovery routine rather than exceptional?

Of course, Saudi Arabia possesses considerably more oil than Nigeria, and that’s acknowledged. But Saudi Arabia built Aramco into something resembling a global commercial corporation that happens to be state-owned. Nigeria built an elaborate petroleum bureaucracy that, for decades, operated with an opacity that made meaningful public scrutiny extraordinarily difficult. Perhaps that is the real tragedy.

But why should any of this matter to me or to anyone of us ? After all, another 

scandal will come, another committee will be inaugurated, another report will be written, another investigation will begin.And eventually, Nigerians will move on. I am not naïve enough to believe that Nigeria will fundamentally change in my lifetime.

So why bother wasting ink on stories such as OPL 245? Maybe these Igbo proverbs will help explain. 

Nwa okuko egbe bu n’isi anaghi ebe ka ihe ji ya hapu ya kama na obu ka oha nu olu ya (The chick carried away by a hawk cries, not because its cries will save it, but so that everyone may hear its voice).

That, perhaps, is the obligation of those who write. We may not be able to stop the hawk. We may not possess the power to wrest the chick from its talons. But we can make enough noise to ensure that nobody can later claim that the chick died quietly.

There is another Igbo saying:

Arụ gbaa aro, ọ ghọọlu omenala( When a criminal act is allowed to fester for years, it eventually ceases to be regarded as criminal and becomes part of the people’s culture).

That is the greater danger facing Nigeria.

Not merely that public wealth is stolen, but that repeated theft eventually becomes normal. That corruption becomes folklore. That impunity becomes governance. That citizens cease to be outraged because outrage itself has become exhausting.

So we will continue to tell these stories.

We will name the transactions, interrogate the institutions, follow the money and preserve the memories. Not because we imagine that the powerful will suddenly develop a conscience, but because history has a long memory, even when citizens do not.

Our generation has failed Nigeria.

Perhaps the machinery of impunity will prove too deeply entrenched for us to dismantle. But someday another generation will inherit this country. And when that generation finally finds the courage to confront the architecture we have spent decades constructing around our national wealth, it should not have to begin from scratch.

Let them know where the bodies are buried. Let them know who built the mausoleum. And, most importantly, let them know that somebody was watching. Somebody was asking questions. Somebody remembered Kweku.

Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor, author, and the 2026 recipient of the Thabo Mbeki Prize for Scholarship and Public Service.