The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project has dragged the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited before a federal court, demanding a full public account of approximately ₦5.9 billion that NNPCL reportedly spent rebranding itself — money drawn, not from corporate profits, but from the proceeds of petroleum products that Nigerians pay for every time they queue at a filling station.
That figure matters most to the roughly 133 million Nigerians living below the poverty line, and to the tens of millions in the informal sector — the Kano groundnut oil seller, the Port Harcourt logistics driver, the Maiduguri generator-dependent shop owner — whose livelihoods are directly squeezed by fuel costs and whose tax money, by any reasonable interpretation, helped foot a rebranding bill they were never told about.
According to SERAP's lawsuit, NNPCL paid ₦2.9 billion for incorporation expenses out of petroleum product proceeds, with the remaining balance covering transition and rebranding costs associated with converting the old Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation — a statutory body — into NNPCL, a limited liability company registered under the Companies and Allied Matters Act following the Petroleum Industry Act of 2021.
The PIA transition was sold to Nigerians as a landmark reform that would commercialise the national oil company, attract investment, and end decades of opacity in a sector that accounts for roughly 90 percent of the country's foreign exchange earnings. But critics have long warned that commercialisation without transparency simply moves the secrecy from a government ministry to a corporate boardroom — and the ₦5.9 billion rebranding bill, quietly absorbed into petroleum proceeds rather than disclosed to the public, is being cited as early evidence of exactly that.
SERAP has asked the court to compel NNPCL to publish a detailed breakdown of every naira spent on the rebranding exercise, including the identities of contractors and consultants who received payments. The group argues that NNPCL, despite its new corporate status, remains a public institution managing a national asset and is therefore bound by constitutional transparency obligations — an argument that directly challenges the company's repeated assertions that it now operates under a commercial governance framework that limits mandatory disclosure.
If the court agrees with SERAP, the ruling could set a significant legal precedent, forcing NNPCL to open its books on a range of expenditure it has so far shielded behind its corporate structure — at a moment when the company is also under pressure to explain fuel supply shortfalls, subsidy removal consequences, and billions in unremitted revenue flagged by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. The case is expected to be heard in the coming weeks, and the National Assembly's petroleum committees, already restless about NNPCL's audit culture, will be watching closely.
For the ordinary Nigerian who paid more for petrol to fund a rebrand they never approved and may never have heard of, this lawsuit is the first official attempt to answer a simple question: who signed off, and where exactly did the money go.
