On March 13, 2026, President Bola Tinubu announced the Presidential Petroleum Reform & Value Optimisation Taskforce — a nine-member body chaired by Fola Adeola, co-founder of Guaranty Trust Bank, tasked with producing three reform blueprints within six months.
The announcement arrives at a particularly fraught moment. Nigeria averaged just 1.46Million barrels per day (BOPD) in 2025, some 500,000 BOPD below its own budget target of 2.06MMBOPD, generating a revenue shortfall exceeding $6.8Billion in the first eight months of the year alone. By January 2026, crude output had slipped further to 1.31MMBOPD — a 190,000BOPD deficit against Nigeria’s OPEC allocation.
These are not marginal misses. They reflect a structural and governance failure playing out against a backdrop of acute institutional turbulence. In April 2025, President Tinubu sacked the entire NNPC board, replacing Group CEO Mele Kyari with Bayo Ojulari, former Managing Director of SNEPCO, the UK major Shell’s deepwater subsidiary in Nigeria. See More/Details