FROM OUR ARCHIVE/BLAST FROM THE PAST
By Toyin Akinosho
Ben Osuno began our interview by turning the tables, assuming the position of the interviewer. “Who are the we?”, he asked, querying my explanation that “we” had chosen to use a slice of the story of his life to illustrate the Nigerian oil industry through the country’s 50 years of independence. “And who says that the Nigerian oil industry was birthed at independence?”, he further queried. But the more he tried to wriggle himself out of being marked a personal symbol for the hopes, aspirations, impediments, success and constraints the industry has faced, the more he revealed that there was no one more fitting for the role.
Osuno graduated as a Physicist at the country’s premier University: the University College Ibadan, in April 1960 and joined ShellBP on September 13, 1960, 17 days shy of Nigeria’s independence. The company had only started crude oil production in 1958, having discovered oil in commercial quantities two years before then. He was 24. Shell trained him as a geophysicist. He was, thus, the first Nigerian earth scientist employed by the first hydrocarbon production company in the country.
“But there were Nigerians in the industry before me”, he insisted. “Shell had a downstream company named Shell West Africa and it was thriving long before I came out of school”.
“We are far more interested in the upstream”, I pointed out.
“Yes there were also people: administrators, accountants. Chief Feyide (the first Nigerian secretary general of OPEC) was there in public administration”, Osuno countered. “And some of the engineers who were ahead of me in ShellBP are still alive”.
“When Nigeria Lost the Opportunity to Transform the State Oil Company
A newspaper reporter put his (Osuno’s) back on a wall by asking him what the NNOC was going to do with the discovery. To which he responded that an appraisal option was on the table.
His supervisors in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources read the story in the papers and gave him a query; why would he report such a thing in the press before the government itself had been fully apprised of it?“
Of course there were three of them who graduated in Physics from the University College in Ibadan in the year Nigeria brought down the Union Jack. But as Osuno went to work for Shell as a geoscientist, Festus Marinho and Odoliyi Lolomari went to work for government as petroleum engineers. Marinho rose to become the General Manager of the state hydrocarbon company Nigerian National Oil Company (NNOC) and later Managing Director of a much larger state hydrocarbon company Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation NNPC.
Osuno spent 13 years in the employ of ShellBP, leaving in 1973 and joining the NNOC in 1974. Feyide didn’t “happen on the scene around independence”, as Osuno, Marinho and Lolomari did.
And neither Marinho nor Lolomari, however exceptional they may be, can count the private sector, especially the country’s largest oil producing company and the breeding ground of its most astute upstream entrepreneurs, as part of how they were made.
Osuno worked both in the private sector and the public arena. By age 43, he was already head of the Petroleum Inspectorate.
At 74, he was the chairman of Niger Delta Exploration and Production, one of the country’s most successful independents.
That was when this interview was conducted, in September 2010.
The Minutes…
BEN OSUNO had spent barely a year working for the government when the most momentous event of his career occurred.
He tells the story now without any hint of excitement in his voice, without any sign of nostalgia on his face.
In 1975. an all-Nigerian team of geologists and engineers, working for the state hydrocarbon company Nigerian National Oil Company (NNOC) identified seven hydrocarbon prospects in the south east offshore Niger Delta, the country’s only producing basin. The team drilled all of them and encountered oil in four.
The NNOC had only been created in 1971, so this was the implication: A four-year-old, wholly indigenous African company, made four discoveries in a finger of the Niger Delta basin that was-with the geologic understanding of the time-considered a bad address.
Osuno was 39. As head of the exploration unit, he had direct supervision of the project. None of the men and women who were involved, some of them late, most of them now greying in their late 60s and early 70s, could have known that this was the opening of what could be the most prolific patch of the Gulf of Guinea, described scores of years later by the IHS as the Golden Triangle, featuring Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria/Sao Tome JDZ and deepwater Niger Delta.
Today, in the Nigerian corner of that triangle, on an area spanning less than one sixth of the entire basin, ExxonMobil TOTAL. Addax. Amni and NPDC collectively produce more than 800,000 Barrels of Oil Per Day of oil; around a third of the country’s entire output.
When Osuno joined the NNOC in 1974, he met a company that was ‘raring to go.’
“Even before I joined, (Festus) Marinho as head of NNOC, had done a lot of seismic work offshore, processed, though not interpreted. Not much was done onshore “.
After the geoscientists had gone through the intellectually rigorous exercise of interpreting the data and determining the most optimal places to drill, the company’s engineers designed the well probes and used both personal and official contacts to secure a rig. They could have done more, but money was a constraint.
One afternoon in October 2010, I sat in Mr. Osuno’s small, neat, tidy, sparsely furnished office in Ajah, a fast growing commercial hub of Lekki in the east of Lagos, and asked the 74 year old oilman to tell me what the country got from those significant discoveries. Did the government come out fast and furious to pump money into appraisal and development of the fields and thereby build a robust Nigerian company on the back of that effort? Did the nation use the demonstrated skill and enterprise to create a world class E&P company, capable of competing with the most efficient national champions from elsewhere, out of the?
THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES, IN WHICH THE NNOC HAD STEAMED AHEAD -with so much promise, have become a watershed period in the global history of petroleum resource nationalism. These were the years in which Libya initiated a socialist style nationalization programme under which the government either nationalized oil companies or became a participant in their concessions, production and transportation facilities. It was the decade in which Norway created Statoil as a limited liability company owned by the Government, to boost the country’s participation in the oil Industry and to build up Norwegian competency; it was the period in which Angola transformed a subsidiary of a Portuguese company ANG0L, nationalized it and split in two, forming Sonangol U.E.E. and Direcção Nacional de Petróleos and later instituting Sonangol as a state-owned company with a mandate to manage the country s hydrocarbon reserves. It was in those years that Qatar Petroleum was created, following that country’s nationalization of the oil sector.
The 70s witnessed the Arab-lsraell War, during which Saudi Arabia, Libya, and other Arab states proclaimed an embargo on oil exports to countries who supported Israel, primarily the United States. It was a period of global surge in demand, a decade in which Venezuela, the world’s second largest holder of crude oil reserves, nationalized its oil industry.
Osuno ‘s career was forged in the tumult of that era.
After graduation, Osuno taught briefly at a school near his hometown in the east of the country. He didn’t show interest when the first set of head-hunters came calling. “I didn’t want to be a marketer”, he says of his attitude to Shell West Africa, the petroleum product retailer. He was more receptive, however when he learned that ShellBP, which operated wholly independent of the other Shell, was an Exploration and Production company. He felt more comfortable with being involved in the seismic acquisition projects the company was carrying out in eastern Nigeria at that time. Shell was very much an eastern Nigerian company and their headquarters was in Owerri. “They moved to Port Harcourt later, following indications that the geological formation was dipping down to the muddy swamp they were avoiding”, he tells me.
The interview session with Shell BP management representatives in Owerri felt like a roundtable discussion.
Shell’s recruitment of Osuno as its first Nigerian geoscientist meant more than was apparent at the time: the company had the entire country as one concession. There were to be no competitors until Nigeria had become fully independent and opened up the space for companies from other jurisdictions.
As a career geophysicist, Osuno worked in a field of technical activity spanning seismic acquisition work, as well as processing and interpretation of processed seismic data. For a while, there were no others like him.
But Osuno didn’t feel exactly like a superman. “People looked at me as if ‘well you’re one of the top’ people’, but when you are a brand new employee in an oilfield environment you are conscious of the little you know. I would learn even from technicians”, he says. He was keen on learning the job ‘because I had limited experience’.
He also didn’t feel any racism, subtle or aggressive. “I believe in defining these things for what they were. I don’t want to use the word Inferiority or superiority complex. You have nationalities which were different. You have educational barriers, I as a person didn’t feel any complex. I was a new man, learning a new job. I didn’t know what racism meant. l never heard the word before”.
Years later Osuno went to The Hague, in the Netherlands on an assignment. He had an encounter with a Nigerian petroleum engineer, who had studied in London. The new acquaintance fed him the idea that the English were racists. “From that time on, I started feeling conscious of the possibility”.
Racism wasn’t institutionalized in the company, Osuno observes, “It wasn’t official. Some form of racism might be inherent in individual character traits, but it wasn’t a company policy. You got an Englishman who was comfortable in his own skin and didn’t feel any complex towards other races and yet you had another who could be quite aggressive”.
As a matter of fact. ShellBP as of then had a problem with Indonesia and Venezuela and some Middle Eastern countries over indigenization of opportunities.
“I didn’t feel like a fish out of water by the virtue of my nationality, but I was keen on the job because I had limited experience. Some Dutchman quarrelled with me. I quarrelled back with him. The next thing I knew was that the man had been expelled.
“Here I was being projected. They’d told the Nigerian government that they were hiring Nigerians. The company was being very careful. I was being respected at the highest level as a Nigerian to be handled with care”.
Apart from disrupting crude oil production, the Nigerian civil war (1967-70) kept Osuno and other eastern Nigerians away from ShellBP offices. When the company resumed activity, Osuno was one of those recalled.
In 1970/71, he was the highest ranking Nigerian in Shell exploration, “although some of those expatriates I was supervising were now my supervisors”.
Things were beginning to unravel.
In January 1972, ShellBP sent Osuno on cross posting in The Hague, to broaden his experience. He was supposed to spend 18 months. The great oil shocks came in at the end of that year. The world was embroiled in conflict underlined by the Arab/Israeli war. By the time Osuno’s 18months ended, Nigeria, his home country, had joined the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Shell was being cautious about Nigeria: should it continue, should it not?
“They told me that their stay m Nigeria was a bit tenuous. And that maybe I should stay in The Hague a bit longer. l spent another six months, leading to two years. They told me point blank that investing in exploration was going to be more tentative; they were going to downgrade their exploration activities. They thought I should stay more in The Hague”.
The NNOC had just been set up. “My colleaques, Marinho and others, were prevailing on me to come. I could have gone to another Shell operation elsewhere in the world, but l would be an expatriate in such a country and may be subject to a negative attitude to non-nationals in that country.”
In December of 1973, two years after he left for The Hague, Osuno decided to buy his own ticket and return home to Nigeria. He had spent 13 years and roughly four months with Shell BP. “They insisted that they had to promote me to Senior Geophysicist, as a mark of appreciation, even though I was leaving”.
In February 1974, Osuno’s friend, Marinho, hastily arranged an interview for him with Phillip Asiodu, then Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Mines and Power. He started on the new job in May 1974.
SO IT WAS BARELY A YEAR AFTER HE JOINED THE NNOC that Osuno led the expedition to drill seven wildcat wells from which were four discoveries, three of them on commercial production today. As anyone with a close reading of Nigeria’s progress through 50 years of independence would suspect, the government didn’t convert the successes into building a world class hydrocarbon company with an upstream arm that operates on its own steam. But Osuno’s personal take on it is instructive. “The people in government, who looked after the money, were not as confident as we were. If the wells had not worked out, they’d have chopped off Osuno’s head”. Indeed, ministry officials, let alone the Federal Executive Council (the cabinet), didn’t exactly take ownership of the’ success.
Osuno says: “Within the constraints of the environment at that time, how much would government spend to develop the wells, when they could give the acreages to Shell, without spending money?”.
The decision was taken that NNOC should just keep on exploring.
I ask him if there was any enthusiasm on the part of the NNOC and management, that this could be a major break and Osuno narrates a story of how he got a query from the ministry.
It so happened that the crew were celebrating one of the finds on the field and the media picked up the news. A reporter put his (Osuno’s) back on a wall by asking him what the NNOC was going to do with the discovery. To which he responded that an appraisal option was on the table.
His supervisors in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources read the story in the papers and gave him a query; why would he report such a thing in the press before the government itself had been fully apprised of it?
35 years later, Osuno is still very cautious about how he deals with the press. A large swath of the information he dispensed with during our interview is “off the record”.
The Ministry of Petroleum Resources was merged with the NNOC in 1977 to create the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation NNPC. The corporation instantly attracted top talent from the majors: “A few more people came… Adesemowo, Orife…. People came from Mobil. People came from Texaco. Those available at the time”.
In addition to its exploration activities, the Corporation was given powers and operational interests in refining, petrochemicals and products transportation as well as marketing. Between 1978 and 1989, NNPC constructed refineries in Warri, Kaduna and Port Harcourt and took over the 35,000-barrel Shell Refinery established in Port Harcourt in 1965.
In 1988, the NNPC was commercialised into 12 strategic business units, covering the entire spectrum of oil industry operations: exploration and production, gas development, refining, distribution, petrochemicals, engineering, and commercial investments.
BUT BEFORE ALL OF THESE CHANGES, OSUNO HAD MOVED ON AGAIN. In 1979. as the country returned to civilian rule after 15 years of military dictatorship, its first homegrown petroleum geoscientist was taking charge of the industry’s regulatory activities. Ben Osuno was seconded from NNPC to take over the headship of the Petroleum Inspectorate (latterly called the Department of Petroleum Resources DPR), from the legendary Meshach Otokiti Feyide, at the age of 43. His job was to ensure operators’ compliance with industry regulations; process applications for licenses, leases and permits, establish and enforce environmental regulations.
It was in his office on Victoria Island, a whispering distance from the Cowrie creek, part of the lagoonal neck into the south Atlantic, that I first met him in 1985. I was 25, a rookie reporter for The Guardian, basking in my own self recognition as the first energy reporter for the country’s flagship newspaper.
“I don’t talk to the press”, he announced, fixing me a strong, steady gaze.
“And if you credit anything to me, including my refusal to talk. I will take it up”. It has taken 25 years for me to know why he felt the way he did.
This interview is 16 years old, and as Osuno turns 90, feted by his core constituency, the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) at a very special technical session, here’s a toast to a very fulfilled life of a true pioneer.
This is an abridged version of the feature: Ben Osuno, the minutes of those early minutes, published in the October-November 2010 edition of the Africa Oil+Gas Report.
