The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, SERAP, has taken the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited to court over its failure to account for an alleged 5.9 billion naira spent on the incorporation, transition and rebranding of the former NNPC into the NNPCL. The legal action puts a spotlight on how the country's most strategic state-owned enterprise has handled a large sum of public money.
According to the group, the court case did not come out of nowhere. Before heading to court, SERAP first wrote a Freedom of Information request to the NNPC, asking the company to provide details of the allegation that it had used the 5.9 billion naira to rebrand. The stated aim was to give the institution the opportunity to explain itself and to set the record straight on the spending.
The Freedom of Information Act gives public institutions a window of seven days to respond to such requests. SERAP said that when that deadline expired without any response from the NNPC, it decided to approach the court to enforce its right of access to information about the management of public resources.
The suit essentially seeks to compel the NNPCL, an entity that operates as a private company but is funded with public money, to explain and give a detailed account of the contested expenditure. Among the questions raised are how exactly the funds were spent, who authorised and approved the spending, which contractors benefited from it, and whether due process was followed throughout.
The group stressed that this is not the first time it has dragged the national oil company to court over transparency. It said several similar matters, largely public-interest cases stemming from Freedom of Information requests, remain pending before the Federal High Court in Lagos and Abuja, with judgment yet to be delivered in those suits.
The controversy has also drawn the attention of lawmakers, with the spending surfacing among the line items that the Senate Public Accounts Committee identified in the NNPC's audited financial statement. Coming at a time of economic hardship and growing demands for accountability in public institutions, the case has revived long-standing concerns that the NNPC, Nigeria's biggest revenue earner, remains opaque in the way it runs its operations.