The 90-day clock on Nigeria’s oil future, By Muntasir Adamu Kanam

Not by speeches. Not by photographs. Not even by signature bonuses. But by whether, three years from now, we can point to producing wells, instead of framed licence certificates. The 2025 Licensing Round is over. The countdown has begun. Ninety days may not sound like a long time. But in Nigeria’s petroleum history, it could make all the difference.

Every now and then, something important happens in Nigeria without attracting the attention it deserves. It is almost as if we have become conditioned to ignore quiet successes, while reserving all our energy for loud failures. A fuel queue will trend. A political quarrel will dominate the airwaves. A celebrity’s social media drama will occupy our timelines. But a policy reform that could reshape one of the country’s biggest industries? Not so much.

That is why I have been thinking about what happened at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, on 21 July, when the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) concluded the country’s 2025 Oil Block Licensing Round. It was one of those government events that many people would dismiss as routine. Officials made speeches. Winners smiled for the cameras. Certificates changed hands. Everybody went home. But I suspect we may look back at that day differently.

The numbers tell an interesting story. The licensing round, which opened in December 2025, attracted 143 participating companies that submitted roughly 200 bids. Fifty oil blocks were available. Thirty-seven eventually found successful bidders involving 31 companies, while 13 received no bids at all and quietly returned to the government’s inventory.

Now, in our peculiar environment, where government often feels compelled to declare every exercise a hundred per cent success, someone may ask: Why were 13 blocks left behind? Shouldn’t every block have been allocated? Actually, no. In fact, I would have been more worried if every single block had found a buyer.

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Oil companies are not Father Christmas. They invest where the numbers make sense. Before submitting a bid, they study seismic data, estimate recoverable reserves, calculate production costs, assess fiscal terms and measure political risks. If, after doing all that, they decide a block is not commercially attractive, the sensible thing is not to bid.

That is how markets work. There is an old saying that the market is wiser than the government. Governments often believe everything has value because they own it. Investors believe an asset is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. Sometimes, the most honest bid is no bid at all. And that is why those 13 unsold blocks do not worry me.

If anything, they suggest that this licensing round was driven more by commercial judgment than political patronage.

Nigeria has never really struggled with announcing licensing rounds. Our problem has always been what happens after the applause. This is why the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) matters. For almost two decades, Nigerians debated petroleum sector reform. Governments came and went. Draft bills gathered dust. Investors delayed decisions because they simply did not know what the rules would look like tomorrow.

Those who have followed Nigeria’s petroleum industry long enough know why these matters. We have travelled this road before. The licensing rounds of the mid-2000s generated more court cases than oil production. Questions over discretionary awards lingered for years. Some licences changed hands without a single well being drilled. Others became bargaining chips in boardroom negotiations, rather than instruments for developing national resources.

The 2020 Marginal Field Licensing Round sought to deepen indigenous participation, and that objective was laudable. But it also exposed familiar challenges: fragmented ownership structures, financing constraints, and prolonged delays before many awardees could move from paper ownership to actual field development.

When the PIA was eventually signed into law in 2021, its promise was simple enough: reduce discretion, strengthen institutions and make Nigeria’s petroleum governance more predictable. Laws, however, are only as good as the people who implement them. From what we have seen so far, this licensing round appears to be one of the strongest practical demonstrations of what the PIA was designed to achieve.

The process was conducted publicly. Independent observers, including the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), monitored the exercise alongside representatives of key federal ministries. Commercial bids were opened transparently. Evaluation criteria were known in advance. That may sound ordinary. It is not. In a country where opacity has often been mistaken for official procedure, transparency deserves recognition.

Perhaps the most revealing moment came when the Commission disclosed that members of its evaluation teams had worked under serious threats and intimidation, almost until the eve of the commercial bid opening. That statement stayed with me. Think about it. If people are willing to intimidate regulators before licences are awarded, imagine the commercial value attached to those assets.

More importantly, imagine what would have happened if the regulators had succumbed. Institutions are not tested on sunny days. They are tested when powerful interests come knocking. The encouraging thing is not that pressure existed. Pressure exists everywhere. The encouraging thing is that the process appears to have survived it.

Nigeria is no longer competing against its own past. It is competing against the rest of the world. That is why transparency is no longer just a governance issue. It is now an investment strategy. Investors may forgive geological uncertainty. After all, exploration is inherently risky. What they increasingly refuse to tolerate is regulatory uncertainty. That is where the success or failure of this licensing round will ultimately be determined.

But let me suggest that the most important figure from the entire licensing round is not 143 companies, or 37 awarded blocks, or even 50 blocks on offer. It is 90. That is the number of days every successful bidder has to pay the required signature bonus. Miss the deadline and the reserve bidder takes over. Simple.

That provision may sound administrative, but it could become one of the most transformative reforms in Nigeria’s upstream sector. For years, we celebrated companies that won oil blocks without asking whether they had the financial capacity or technical competence to develop them. Some licences remained idle for years. Others became speculative assets traded from one investor to another, while Nigeria waited for production that never came. This new approach changes the conversation. Winning an oil block is no longer enough. You must prove that you deserve it. And even that is only the beginning.

The Federal Government expects these newly awarded assets to add about 500 million barrels to Nigeria’s proven reserves, currently estimated at 37.01 billion barrels, while contributing roughly 300,000 additional barrels of daily production within three years. Those projections are encouraging. They are also demanding. Because oil does not flow simply because a licence has been awarded. It flows when companies raise capital, mobilise rigs, drill wells, build infrastructure, manage environmental obligations, engage host communities and navigate the realities of operating in one of the world’s most complex petroleum provinces.

The ceremony has ended. The real work has not even started. Meanwhile, the global energy landscape is becoming more competitive by the day. Guyana has become one of the world’s fastest-growing oil producers. Namibia continues to excite investors with major offshore discoveries. Angola has been quietly reforming its fiscal framework. Even established producers are redesigning regulatory systems to compete for scarce upstream capital.

Muntasir Adamu Kanam writes from Lagos.