Continuing from last week, this is the memoir of the late Prof. Jibril Aminu, a great man who welcomed me into his office at the Senate with a shocker: “So, this is you, Mike Awoyinfa, the man I offered a job to come and work as my Chief Press Secretary when I was Oil Minister, but I was told you were not interested.” The truth, as I told him then, was: “Nobody ever approached me on working as your Chief Press Secretary. This is news to me. I am hearing it for the first time.” He too was equally shocked as he shook his head. But then, we had to let bygone be bygone and face what I had come for: an interview for a book on Mike Adenuga. This is the second part of the Jibril Aminu oil memoir which was published last Saturday in this column. May Professor Jibril Aminu’s soul rest in peace:
***
President Babangida had nothing to do with my meeting Mike Adenuga. He was brought by David Ogbodo and I didn’t know him at that time. I had heard of Devcom and Equatorial Trust Bank but I didn’t know he was the owner of the two banks. Ogbodo told me: “There is this man who is doing well. Come and see him.” And I said: “Let him come and see me.” At that time, we were in Falomo. So he went there to see me. Babangida had nothing to do with my allocating the oil block to him or allocating it to anybody else. That I can say before man and God. Babangida never had anything to do with Mike or even giving a contract to anybody. Not him. He is a completely different sort of man. And when somebody who was oil minister for 30 months tells you that, it tells you something about him.
Only Babangida can explain why he chose me as his oil minister. I was just sitting in my office as education minister when the Vice President, Admiral Aikhomu phoned to ask me: “Where would you find Fafunwa?” I told him: “I don’t know where he is, sir.” Then he told me: “He is going to education ministry. And you are going to petroleum. Congratulations.” That was how I got there. I later went and had a discussion with the President and he told me that for some time, they had been considering me for the post of oil minister. But it couldn’t have been because I was an oil expert, because I wasn’t. I was a doctor, vice chancellor and a minister of education. I don’t think my petroleum credentials were very high when I went there. But I had to learn. I learnt a lot. There was an engineer by name Osunor. He was the Director, Petroleum Resources. He was one of my teachers. A lot of them were my teachers. He wrote papers on the petroleum industry for me to go and read. I learnt from him and from Dr. John who was appointed G.M. not long after. I learnt a lot also from Mr. Adesomowo who was then upstream. I was never ashamed to learn. I was not ashamed of my background as a cardiologist. It was easy for me to ask them. In the first two, three months, I was actually reading and reading until I got familiar with the terms—things like API. Petroleum, crude oil is graded according to API units. The higher the API units, the higher the quality. Things like Qua Iboe and Brass. They are very light, sweet crude with very high API. I didn’t know what API stood for. They told me it means American Petroleum Institute. So the grading was done by the American Petroleum Institute. My people wrote papers for me and some of them got easy booklets on petroleum for me to read. The thing that was more difficult was to get into the commercial state of mind, because in education, I was the spender. And from there, you come into oil where you are the greatest earner. And you have to change your attitude. My colleagues in the cabinet noticed a change in my attitude from a spender—somebody in the welfare, somebody who had this rather left wing, liberal views on things—to someone now dealing with commercial, with business people. I learnt quite a lot and I thank God for that.
Back to Mike Adenuga, he’s been very good, very successful, he is a go-getter. After Consolidated Oil, he moved in to express himself in National Oil where it was being privatised. By that time, I had left petroleum and he got it, changed it to Conoil. And then he moved to Glo. I was worried for him when they said he paid $20 million and it was not refundable. I went to one or two places on his behalf and I am very happy he was able to recoup his $20 million and more. He is a great businessman. I don’t know what he is working on now, but I won’t be surprised if he is working on some atomic energy thing or something like that. He is very busy but when I look at the kind of things he is doing and the fact that he has to be on the move and run, he reminds me of somebody who said: “Naira is running at 90 miles per hour and Nigerians are following it at 120 miles per hour.” That is the situation. I am looking forward till when he would have made it and he would find time to relax. A lot of people feel he has made it hundreds of times over, but when he feels he has made it, maybe he would then sit down to relax and look for old friends.
What I told some of these businessmen who came, saying we should give them oil contract is that: “You would not get any oil contract from me. The only oil you would export is your own. Get this block, go and organise the business, explore, reproduce and sell. And nobody would ever terminate your contract. But if you want Shell to produce and out of what Shell produces, Nigeria takes and gives you 20,000 or 30,000 barrels a day, you get five per cent per barrel commission. That for me is nothing.”
People did that and made money, lived on that but it never impressed me. The people that impressed me are those like Mike Adenuga who can take the block and go and get oil.
There is a lot of similarity between MKO Abiola and Mike Adenuga. The only thing about Adenuga is that he is a strict businessman. He is Bill Gates type of man. He is in the league of Warren Buffet and Rupert Murdoch. These are people who don’t care about politics. They just go to succeed in business. That is the kind of man Mike Adenuga is. If you expand Nigeria’s economy to be the size of the United States, then Adenuga would obviously be one of the Bill Gates, if not the Rockefellers.