By Alex Ter Adum, PhD
The accusation that Atiku Abubakar “almost sold Nigeria” through the privatisation programme is one of those political slogans that becomes more misleading the more frequently it is repeated.
It sounds powerful.
But, it is historically weak.
The allegation takes a complex national economic reform programme, reduces it to the personality of one Vice President and then asks Nigerians to believe that a statutory council chaired by Atiku Abubakar was somehow his personal auction house.
It was not.
The history of Nigeria’s privatisation programme is considerably more complicated, and considerably less sensational, than the slogan suggests.
To understand what actually happened, we must begin with the most basic fact.
THE PRIVATISATION PROGRAMME DID NOT BEGIN WITH ATIKU
Nigeria’s privatisation programme did not originate with Atiku Abubakar.
Its institutional history goes back to the Technical Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation, established in 1988 under the Babangida administration. That structure subsequently evolved into the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) and was eventually given a statutory framework under the Public Enterprises (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act.
The BPE itself traces its institutional origins to the 1988 Technical Committee and was recreated in 1999 as an independent agency responsible for implementing the Federal Government’s privatisation programme.
That historical fact alone should immediately put the “Atiku invented privatisation” narrative to rest.
The programme predated him.
It survived him.
And it continued under successive administrations long after he left office.
What Atiku stepped into as Vice President and Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) was therefore not a personal project but an existing national economic policy and institutional framework.
WHAT DID ATIKU ACTUALLY CHAIR?
This is where the distinction between political rhetoric and institutional reality becomes important.
Section 9 of the 1999 Public Enterprises (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act established the National Council on Privatisation (NCP).
The law did not transfer ownership of Nigeria’s assets to the Vice President.
It did not make the Vice President the proprietor of the enterprises being privatised.
And it certainly did not give him unilateral authority to dispose of public property at will.
It made the Vice President Chairman of a statutory Council.
The Council included the Minister of Finance, the Attorney-General of the Federation, the Minister of Industry, the Deputy Chairman of the National Planning Commission, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the Governor of the Central Bank, the Special Adviser to the President on Economic Affairs, four presidential appointees and the Director-General of the BPE.
The BPE served as the technical and implementing agency and as secretariat to the NCP, while the Council functioned as the policy-making body.
That distinction is fundamental.
Atiku did not own the enterprises.
He did not personally determine their market value.
He did not personally receive their proceeds.
And he did not possess unilateral statutory authority to auction Nigeria.
He chaired a multi-member statutory institution established by law.
If merely chairing the NCP makes Atiku personally responsible for every transaction undertaken under Nigeria’s privatisation programme, then every subsequent Vice President who chaired the same statutory institution should logically bear the same responsibility.
That would include Goodluck Jonathan, Namadi Sambo, Yemi Osinbajo and Kashim Shettima.
The logic obviously becomes absurd.
The identity of the Chairman cannot magically transform a statutory institutional process into a personal enterprise.
PRIVATISATION IS NOT THE “SALE OF NIGERIA”
The next problem with the slogan is conceptual.
Privatisation does not mean selling Nigeria.
It does not mean selling Nigerian territory.
It does not mean surrendering national sovereignty.
It means transferring some or all government ownership or operational control of particular commercial enterprises to private investors, usually in pursuit of greater efficiency, investment, technology, managerial expertise and financial sustainability.
The BPE identifies among the objectives of privatisation the improvement of economic efficiency, increased private-sector participation and reduction of the financial burden imposed on government by inefficient public enterprises.
That is the economic question that successive Nigerian governments were confronting.
Not:
“How much of Nigeria can we sell?”
But:
“Why should the Nigerian taxpayer continue financing commercial enterprises that government has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to operate efficiently?”
That is a legitimate economic question.
And it cannot be answered by simply shouting “national assets.”
THE REAL TEST: WHAT VALUE DOES OWNERSHIP PRODUCE?
There is a fundamental distinction that Nigerian political discourse too often ignores:
Ownership is not the same thing as value.
A government may own an enterprise 100 percent and still destroy enormous economic value through inefficiency, corruption, poor management, political interference and technological stagnation.
Conversely, government can retain regulatory authority and strategic interests while allowing private capital to operate an enterprise more efficiently.
The national interest should therefore not be measured simply by how many shares government owns.
It should be measured by what Nigerians receive from those assets.
Does the enterprise produce?
Does it create jobs?
Does it attract investment?
Does it pay taxes?
Does it provide reliable services?
Does it generate returns?
Does it reduce the burden on the public treasury?
Those are the questions that matter.
THE PROGRAMME PRODUCED REAL TRANSFORMATION
This does not mean that every privatisation transaction was perfect.
It means that the proposition that privatisation itself was synonymous with “selling Nigeria” is historically and economically unsustainable.
The United States Department of State has recorded that since 1999 the BPE privatised or concessioned more than 140 enterprises across sectors including telecommunications, cement, steel, aluminium, petrochemicals, hotels, aviation, vehicle assembly and electricity. It also reported that the programme raised more than $4 billion in its earlier years.
The telecommunications sector provides perhaps the clearest illustration.
Nigeria entered the democratic era with an extraordinarily underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructure. The BPE records that the country had fewer than 500,000 telephone lines and a teledensity of approximately 0.4 percent before the sector reforms.
The opening of the sector to private investment, the licensing of GSM operators and the strengthening of regulation fundamentally changed that situation.
Today, Nigerians communicate through an enormous telecommunications ecosystem that would have been difficult to imagine under the old government-dominated structure.
Nobody seriously argues that the arrival of GSM operators amounted to “selling Nigeria.”
Why?
Because Nigerians experienced the benefits.
That is precisely how economic reform should be judged.
THE REFINERIES: THE CASE THAT REQUIRES THE MOST HONEST DISCUSSION
If there is one area where the “Atiku wanted to sell Nigeria” argument requires particularly careful examination, it is the refineries.
In May 2007, Blue Star Oil Services, a consortium involving Dangote Oil, Zenon Oil and Transcorp interests, paid $561 million for a 51 percent stake in the Port Harcourt refinery. A separate transaction involving the Kaduna refinery was reported at $160 million.
Together, the transactions amounted to approximately $721 million.
The transactions were subsequently reversed by the Yar’Adua administration.
Those facts deserve serious examination.
But they do not support the simplistic proposition that:
“Atiku wanted to sell Nigeria’s refineries.”
The circumstances were more complicated.
The transactions occurred towards the end of the Obasanjo administration and generated controversy over their process, structure and desirability. Contemporary reporting indicated that Blue Star had completed payment for the Port Harcourt transaction.
There was also a significant institutional controversy surrounding the role of the Vice President.
Femi Falana, SAN, argued that President Olusegun Obasanjo had sidelined Atiku in aspects of the refinery transactions despite the statutory role assigned to the Vice President as Chairman of the NCP.
Whether one accepts Falana’s legal characterization or not, the controversy itself demonstrates the weakness of portraying Atiku as a lone actor with unrestricted authority over the country’s refineries.
If Atiku was supposedly single-handedly “selling Nigeria,” why was there a serious controversy over the extent of his involvement in some of the transactions?
That question deserves an answer.
NIGERIA GOT THE REFINERIES BACK. THEN CAME THE BILL.
The reversal of the refinery transactions returned the assets to government ownership.
But recovering ownership is not the same thing as creating economic value.
Once the refineries returned to state control, the Federal Government also retained responsibility for their rehabilitation, maintenance, operation and repeated financial intervention.
And this is the uncomfortable part of the debate that the “Atiku almost sold Nigeria” narrative rarely addresses.
For decades, Nigeria retained ownership of its refineries.
For decades, successive governments spent enormous sums attempting to rehabilitate them.
For decades, Nigeria nevertheless remained heavily dependent on imported petroleum products.
That raises a much more fundamental question:
What is the economic value of ownership without operational performance?
A refinery does not become efficient because the Federal Government owns it.
A steel plant does not become productive because it carries the Nigerian flag.
A power company does not become efficient because politicians describe it as a “national asset.”
Ownership is a legal relationship.
Productivity is an economic outcome.
Nigeria needs both.
A SERIOUS DEFENCE MUST ALSO ACKNOWLEDGE THE FAILURES
This is where a serious defence of privatisation differs from propaganda.
Not every privatisation transaction was necessarily well structured.
Some valuations deserve scrutiny.
Some investors failed to meet their obligations.
Some transactions may have produced disappointing outcomes.
Some assets may have been transferred under circumstances that warrant scrutiny.
And some privatisations plainly did not deliver the results Nigerians expected.
The power-sector privatisation is an obvious example of a programme that deserves rigorous evaluation.
But even here, historical accuracy matters.
The power-sector privatisation took place in 2013 – six years after Atiku left office as Vice President.
At that time, Vice President Namadi Sambo was Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation.
Yet political narratives frequently erase this chronology and attribute virtually every subsequent problem associated with privatisation to Atiku.
That is not serious history.
Acknowledging failures does not prove that Atiku “almost sold Nigeria.”
It proves something much more useful:
Privatisation requires competent regulation, transparent valuation, competitive bidding, strong corporate governance and effective post-transaction enforcement.
That is an argument for better privatisation, not an argument for pretending that government ownership automatically produces efficiency.
THE DANGER OF CONFUSING GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL INTEREST
There is a persistent assumption in Nigerian politics that anything owned by government is automatically protected national wealth.
History does not support that assumption.
A government-owned enterprise can become a permanent drain on the treasury.
It can consume subsidies.
It can accumulate debt.
It can require repeated capital injections.
It can become a vehicle for political patronage.
It can lose market share.
It can become technologically obsolete.
And eventually, taxpayers pay for the consequences.
That is not necessarily “protecting national assets.”
Sometimes it is simply socialising the cost of inefficiency.
The BPE’s stated rationale for privatisation includes reducing the burden of subsidising inefficient public enterprises and freeing government resources for priorities such as education, healthcare, housing and infrastructure.
That principle remains relevant today.
THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS QUESTION ALONE SHOULD FORCE A RECONSIDERATION
Imagine that Nigeria had insisted in 2001 that telecommunications must remain primarily a government monopoly because allowing private operators such as MTN and Econet to enter the market amounted to “selling Nigeria.”
What would Nigerian telecommunications look like today?
The answer is not difficult to imagine.
The transformation occurred because government created the regulatory architecture and allowed private capital, technology and competition to expand the market.
That is the central lesson.
Government does not have to own everything to protect the national interest.
Sometimes government protects the national interest more effectively by regulating the market, enforcing competition, protecting consumers, collecting taxes and ensuring that private capital operates within clear national rules.
THE REAL TEST SHOULD BE VALUE, NOT OWNERSHIP
Those who defend permanent state ownership must answer a simple question.
If an enterprise remains 100 percent owned by the government but loses billions of naira annually, requires repeated government bailouts and fails to provide reliable services, in what meaningful economic sense have Nigerians won?
Conversely, if government sells a controlling stake in an enterprise, receives fair value, retains appropriate regulatory powers, collects taxes, protects workers and consumers, and the enterprise subsequently becomes productive, profitable and internationally competitive, has Nigeria necessarily been “sold”?
Of course not.
The national interest is not measured simply by the percentage of shares held by government.
It is measured by the economic and social value Nigerians derive from those assets.
AND THIS BRINGS US TO NNPC
The same principle applies with even greater force to the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC).
The question is not whether Nigeria should have a national oil company.
The question is whether a national oil company must remain an opaque, predominantly state-controlled institution in order to serve the national interest.
International examples such as Saudi Aramco, Petrobras and Petronas demonstrate that national strategic interests can coexist with commercial governance, professional management, investor scrutiny and substantial public participation.
Nigeria should be prepared to ask the same question about NNPC.
The company controls enormous national economic interests.
Yet for years, NNPC has faced persistent public concerns about opacity, political interference, accountability, profitability and the management of petroleum revenues.
Recent controversies surrounding its financial reporting and claims raised during legislative oversight – including allegations involving approximately N210 trillion in unexplained or unaccounted-for entries, as well as questions surrounding more than N17 trillion described in various contexts as “under-recoveries” and “energy security” payments – deserve transparent investigation and due process.
These are allegations and should be treated as such until properly established.
But they raise a legitimate institutional question:
Should a company controlling one of Nigeria’s most valuable economic sectors continue to operate with the opacity associated with a government institution, or should it become a commercially governed corporation subject to stronger public disclosure, shareholder scrutiny and enforceable fiduciary obligations?
That is not an ideological question.
It is a governance question.
THE CASE FOR A PRIVATISED AND PUBLICLY QUOTED NNPC
A properly restructured, commercially governed and publicly quoted NNPC could potentially deliver several important advantages.
- GREATER TRANSPARENCY
Public quotation would impose stronger disclosure requirements.
Audited financial statements, material transactions, related-party dealings, executive remuneration, liabilities and cash flows would face greater scrutiny from shareholders, regulators, analysts, journalists and civil society.
Public quotation would not magically eliminate corruption.
But it would make concealment more difficult and create a stronger evidentiary trail for accountability.
- STRONGER CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
A properly constituted board should be required to act in the interests of the company rather than function as an extension of political administration.
Directors would face fiduciary obligations and performance expectations.
Management would increasingly be judged by measurable commercial outcomes:
- production;
- profitability;
- reserves replacement;
- cost control;
- capital efficiency;
- operational reliability; and
- shareholder returns.
The central question would become:
Is NNPC creating value?
- ACCESS TO PRIVATE CAPITAL
Oil and gas operations require enormous investment in exploration, production, pipelines, storage, refining, technology and environmental remediation.
A commercially governed and publicly quoted company could mobilise domestic and international capital without relying excessively on government appropriations or opaque intervention mechanisms.
That could reduce the pressure on the Federal Government to finance commercial operations directly.
- BROADER NIGERIAN OWNERSHIP
There is an irony in claiming that state ownership means Nigerians own the company when ordinary Nigerians have little direct visibility into its financial affairs.
A publicly quoted NNPC could give Nigerians a more tangible stake.
Citizens could participate directly through share ownership, while pension funds, insurance companies and other Nigerian institutional investors could become significant shareholders.
The company could remain strategically Nigerian while becoming more accountable to identifiable owners.
- GREATER OPERATIONAL DISCIPLINE
Private investors and minority shareholders would demand better procurement, lower operating costs, improved asset utilisation and more disciplined capital allocation.
Loss-making subsidiaries and politically protected contracts would face greater pressure for restructuring, reform or termination.
Commercial decisions would have to compete with financial reality.
- STRONGER INVESTOR CONFIDENCE
International investors are more likely to commit capital where ownership structures, financial obligations, governance standards and regulatory responsibilities are clearly defined.
A transparent corporate structure could reduce uncertainty and improve the credibility of Nigeria’s energy sector.
- A CLEARER SEPARATION BETWEEN COMMERCIAL AND REGULATORY FUNCTIONS
This is perhaps the most important institutional reform.
NNPC should operate as a commercial enterprise.
Regulators should regulate.
Government should formulate policy.
The legislature should exercise oversight.
And shareholders should hold management accountable.
The same institution should not simultaneously function as commercial operator, policy instrument, revenue collector and political cash-management mechanism.
That creates conflicts of interest and weakens accountability.
PRIVATISATION DOES NOT MEAN ABANDONING THE NATIONAL INTEREST
Critics often present the Atiku NNPC privatisation policy proposal in 2023 as though the choice were between:
government ownership = national interest
and
private ownership = external control.
That is a false choice.
A country can protect strategic national interests through regulation, taxation, licensing, competition policy, local-content requirements, ownership limits where appropriate, golden shares, security safeguards and strong corporate governance.
The question is not whether the government should disappear from the economy.
The question is what government should own, what government should regulate and what government should leave to commercially disciplined operators.
That distinction is crucial.
Government should not necessarily manufacture cement, operate hotels, run telecommunications companies, manage airlines or own every commercial enterprise.
Its primary responsibility is to create an environment in which productive economic activity flourishes and citizens receive value.
SO, DID ATIKU “ALMOST SELL NIGERIA”?
The claim commits at least three fundamental errors.
First, it personalises a national economic reform programme that began before Atiku and continued long after him.
Second, it confuses statutory chairmanship of a multi-member Council with unilateral ownership and control of public assets.
Third, it equates government ownership with national benefit even where government-owned enterprises have consumed enormous public resources without delivering commensurate value.
None of this means that every privatisation transaction should be defended.
Quite the opposite.
Nigeria’s privatisation programme should be subjected to rigorous historical, financial and legal scrutiny.
Transactions should be audited.
Valuations should be tested.
Beneficiaries should be identified.
Contracts should be examined.
Obligations should be enforced.
Failed transactions should be reviewed.
And where corruption is established, perpetrators should face the law.
But those legitimate demands do not establish that Atiku Abubakar personally attempted to “sell Nigeria.”
The historical record is considerably more complicated.
The programme predated him.
The statutory framework created a multi-member National Council on Privatisation.
The BPE performed the technical and implementation functions.
Private investment was deliberately introduced into sectors where government ownership had produced poor outcomes.
More than 140 enterprises were eventually privatised or concessioned under the broader programme, according to U.S. government reporting.
And some of the most consequential reforms, particularly telecommunications, helped transform sectors that had previously been synonymous with government inefficiency.
THEN LET THE ACCUSATION BE TESTED BY EVIDENCE
Those who insist that Atiku “almost sold Nigeria” should produce something more substantial than a slogan.
Name the asset.
Name the transaction.
Name the valuation.
Name the alleged beneficiary.
Show the evidence of illegality.
Show the personal benefit to Atiku.
Show the unilateral authority he supposedly exercised.
Show the demonstrable loss to Nigeria.
And distinguish all of this from the lawful operation of a statutory privatisation framework that existed before Atiku became Vice President and continued after he left office.
Until then, “Atiku almost sold Nigeria” is not an economic argument.
It is a campaign slogan.
And Nigerians deserve better than slogans.
THE REAL LESSON FROM NIGERIA’S PRIVATISATION EXPERIENCE
The real historical question is not whether Nigeria should ever have privatised public enterprises.
It is whether Nigeria has learned how to combine private capital, public regulation, transparency, competition, accountability and national interest in a way that produces greater value for citizens.
That is the debate we should be having.
And nowhere is that debate more urgent than the petroleum industry.
Nigeria repeatedly chose government ownership.
It repeatedly spent public money.
It repeatedly rehabilitated state assets.
It repeatedly injected capital.
It repeatedly restarted operations.
And it repeatedly returned to importing petroleum products.
Perhaps the lesson is not that Nigeria sold too much.
Perhaps the lesson is that Nigeria owned too much of the wrong things for too long – and failed to extract sufficient value from what it owned.
That is not an argument for selling everything.
It is an argument for being much more intelligent about ownership.
Strategic assets should remain strategically protected.
Commercial enterprises should be commercially governed.
Regulators should regulate.
Government should formulate policy.
Private capital should be allowed to invest.
Citizens should be able to participate in ownership.
And every public asset should ultimately be judged by one overriding question:
What value does it create for Nigerians?
That is the standard by which Nigeria’s privatisation programme should be judged.
Not by political slogans.
Not by nostalgia for government ownership.
And certainly not by the historically lazy claim that one Vice President almost sold a country he neither owned nor possessed the unilateral constitutional or statutory power to auction.
Nigeria is not an inventory of government enterprises.
Nigeria is a nation of more than 200 million citizens whose wealth should be converted into productive economic opportunity, jobs, infrastructure, affordable energy, better services and a higher standard of living.
That is the national interest.
And that is the standard against which every privatisation, every public enterprise and every economic reform should ultimately be measured.
Not who owns the asset on paper.
But whether Nigerians receive value from it.
Alex Ter Adum, PhD
DDG THE NARRATIVE FORCE
