It is like throwing money into the bottomless pit.” But this was one occasion when son disobeyed mum who had been his coach and mentor, business-wise. This oil exploration thing to me is the highest form of gambling. Going into oil exploration is nothing but kalokalo. Mum said in the now famous casino quote: “Niyi, it is better you sell the licence, make your money and invest it. When he finally got the highly coveted oil licence, the elated mum in all honesty called her son, sat him down and advised him not to go into the expensive gamble of looking for oil. It’s a story about how a Nigerian Harry Porter used his magic to do the unthinkable and became the first Nigerian to strike oil in commercial quantity.Įven his mother was surprised, mouth agape with incredulity. Now there arose this young David confronting the Goliaths with a sling of faith, hope and audacity, that with God, nothing is impossible. Six Goliaths bestriding the Nigerian oil space “like a Colossus and we petty men walk under their huge legs,” as William Shakespeare puts it in Julius Caesar. It is a beautiful Nigerian story, or better still an African odyssean epic which happened 30 years ago on the Christmas Day of 1991 when a young man of 37 who had already conquered Nigeria’s corporate world, owning two banks at a go, set his eyes on the upstream sector in an audacious search for oil-something that as at then could only be done by the “six sisters,” six multinationals namely Shell, Chevron, Agip, Total, ExxonMobil, and Texaco.
0 kommentar(er)
