What NNPC has to fix before it can sell shares to the public

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has completed what its group chief executive, Bayo Bashir Ojulari, calls a baseline assessment. In plain terms, NNPC hired advisers to measure the distance between how it runs itself today and how a company listed on a stock exchange is required to run itself. It now says it is closing the gaps that exercise found.

That is the whole of the news. There is no listing date, no price, no decision on how much of the company might be sold, and no confirmation that a sale will happen at all.

What is a "governance gap"?

Think of it as the difference between a company that answers to one owner and a company that answers to thousands.

Right now NNPC has a single shareholder: the federal government. If that shareholder wants to know something, it asks. Once a company lists on a stock exchange, the people who buy shares are part-owners, and they cannot ring up the chief executive. So the law and the exchange require the company to publish on a fixed schedule, in a fixed format, audited by outsiders, with a board structured so that no single group can quietly override it.

A baseline assessment is an adviser measuring how far short of that standard the company currently falls. The gaps are usually unglamorous: reporting that arrives late, subsidiaries whose numbers do not consolidate cleanly, board committees that do not exist yet, internal controls nobody has written down.

NNPC has already made one visible move in this direction. It began publishing monthly performance reports in May 2025.

Why is NNPC doing this at all?

Because of the Petroleum Industry Act of 2021. That law broke up the old state oil corporation and rebuilt it as NNPC Limited, a company meant to operate commercially rather than as a government department. The Act also provides for the company's shares to be sold.

Ojulari has described the listing as a legal requirement rather than a choice. That is his characterisation of the Act, and it is worth noting the distinction between a law providing for a share sale and a law compelling one by a particular date. (Rainingmoney's reading — the Act's exact wording on timing is not quoted in the source material.)

So when is it actually happening?

This is where the public record gets slippery. The stated position has moved more than once:

• March 2025 — Reuters reported NNPC was in the final stages of IPO preparation, with no timeline attached.
• July 2025 — Ojulari said at an OPEC seminar the company was on track to list by 2028.
• November 2025 — he said NNPC would be IPO-ready "beyond 2026."
• September 2026 — presenting the 2025 audited accounts, he said plainly: "The decision to take IPO is not ours." Shareholders decide; management only prepares.
• October 2026 — the baseline assessment is done and gaps are being closed.

None of these contradict each other outright. Together they describe a company getting ready without committing to a day.

What do the accounts look like?

NNPC published audited 2025 results in September. The headline numbers are unusual, and worth sitting with.

Revenue fell by 24%, to ₦34.5 trillion. That implies about ₦45.4 trillion the year before — a drop of roughly ₦10.9 trillion. (Derived.) NNPC attributes the fall mainly to lower crude oil prices and to selling fewer refined products after the market was deregulated in 2024.

Yet profit after tax rose 33%, from ₦5.4 trillion to ₦7.2 trillion — ₦1.8 trillion more.

Shrink the company to ₦100 to see what changed. In 2024, every ₦100 of revenue left about ₦11.90 as profit. In 2025, every ₦100 left about ₦20.87. (Both derived.) The company sold considerably less and kept noticeably more of what it sold.

Where does the money go now?

To one shareholder. NNPC declared a ₦5.8 trillion dividend for 2025, up 35%.

Set that against the ₦7.2 trillion profit and it works out at roughly ₦81 of every ₦100 earned, paid out to the federal government. (Derived.)

That single ratio is the quiet heart of the IPO question. A listed company has outside shareholders expecting their share of profit, and it also needs to retain earnings to invest. Whoever eventually buys NNPC shares would be buying into that argument.

What to watch

This section is Rainingmoney's reading.

Whether a date ever attaches. Readiness work can continue indefinitely. A named date is the first real signal.

How much would be sold. No stake size has been disclosed anywhere. A small float and a controlling one mean entirely different things.

Whether the exchange can absorb it. On 7 October, Vice President Kashim Shettima, speaking for President Tinubu, said an NNPC listing would cause an "unprecedented trading frenzy" and could overwhelm the Nigerian Exchange. He drew the comparison with Dangote Petroleum Refinery's $1.6 billion offer in September.

What happens to the dividend. If the payout ratio has to fall to fund investment, the government's annual receipt falls with it.

The bottom line: NNPC is doing the preparation properly and in public, which is more than the old corporation ever did. But preparation is not a decision, and nobody has made one yet.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.