by Mohammed Bello Doka
On November 22, 2022, Nigeria was told history had been made. In Kolmani, a dusty border community straddling Bauchi and Gombe states, the country celebrated what was presented as a seismic breakthrough: the discovery of crude oil in commercial quantities in Northern Nigeria for the first time. The moment was framed as transformative, symbolic, and urgent. It was sold as proof that Nigeria’s energy future would no longer be geographically lopsided.
Barely three years later, that promise lies in limbo.
The Kolmani Integrated Development Project, launched with fanfare under the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, was not introduced as a modest exploration experiment. It was unveiled as a full-scale, integrated energy and industrial hub. Nigerians were told to expect a 120,000 barrels-per-day refinery, a 500 million standard cubic feet per day gas processing plant, a 300-megawatt power plant, and a 2,500-tonnes-per-day fertilizer facility. The project’s value was repeatedly cited as over $3 billion. It was described, without ambiguity, as a “game changer” for the North and for Nigeria’s energy diversification.
Yet, under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Kolmani has drifted from national priority to administrative afterthought.
There is no sugarcoating the reality: as of early 2026, Kolmani is still stuck in the appraisal phase. There is no commercial production. There is no refinery under construction. There is no gas plant, no fertilizer facility, no power generation. Most troubling of all, there is no clear, publicly stated timeline explaining when—or if—these promises will ever be realised.
This is not a matter of unrealistic expectations. The expectations were deliberately created by the state.
At the project’s inauguration in November 2022, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) spoke in the language of immediacy and impact. Although no firm completion date was announced, industry norms for frontier basins made the implied trajectory clear: exploration and appraisal within one to two years, followed by transition into development by 2024. That did not happen.
Instead, what followed was silence.
From 2023 through most of 2024, Kolmani was effectively dormant. There were no significant drilling activities, no infrastructure rollout, and no public updates that matched the scale of the original announcements. For a project advertised as a multi-billion-dollar national breakthrough, this near-total inactivity should have triggered urgent federal attention. It did not.
By July 2024, frustration spilled into the open. Gombe State Governor Inuwa Yahaya, a member of the ruling party, publicly described the Kolmani project as “stalled” and appealed directly to President Tinubu to intervene. He warned that the lack of progress carried serious economic implications—lost jobs, delayed revenues, and squandered opportunities for both the state and the country. This was not opposition rhetoric. It was an alarm bell from a sitting governor whose state hosts the project.
Nothing changed.
In mid-2025, NNPCL announced that drilling activities would resume following regulatory approvals granted in May. But what communities on the ground saw told a different story. One of the drilling rigs at Kolmani was dismantled and removed. Officials later insisted this was temporary, a technical adjustment to allow for a larger rig. Yet weeks passed, then months, with no visible replacement. Access roads became overgrown with weeds. Activity remained minimal.
By July 2025, host communities had had enough. Protests broke out amid fears that the rigs were being relocated permanently and that the project was being quietly abandoned. Residents spoke of over a year of seized exploration activities. Their anger was not ideological; it was observational. They were reacting to what they could see—or rather, what they could not.
That same month, a joint inspection team from Bauchi and Gombe states visited the Kolmani site. Commissioners Maiwada Bello and Sunusi Ahmad Pindiga publicly bemoaned the slow pace of work. Twenty-six months after the project’s inauguration, state officials were still demanding basic information: a project overview, a timeline, and benchmarks for monitoring progress. The implication was stark—host states themselves were operating in the dark.
By September 2025, the issue had escalated from local grievance to regional concern. North-East governors, led by Borno State Governor Babagana Umara Zulum, met President Tinubu and collectively appealed for the resumption of oil exploration activities in Kolmani and the Lake Chad Basin. They linked the project’s stagnation to broader economic and security challenges in the region and spoke openly about decades of neglect of frontier basins.
Still, there was no decisive response.
Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Kolmani saga is not even the delay itself, but the opacity surrounding money. From the outset, the project was tied to enormous figures. The overall value was pegged at over $3 billion. Independent analyses placed the combined capital and operating expenditure somewhere between $1.9 billion and $3.7 billion, reflecting the high costs of operating in a frontier basin with no existing pipelines or refineries.
In December 2022, NNPCL announced that it had secured $1.4 billion in external project financing for Kolmani. Since then, the public record goes cold. There has been no update on whether those funds were drawn down, restructured, frozen, or redirected. There is no clear account of how much has actually been spent, on what, and with what results.
For a project of this magnitude, such silence is not a technical oversight. It is a governance failure.
Defenders of the Tinubu administration often argue that claims of northern neglect are exaggerated, pointing to data showing significant federal spending on roads, rail, pipelines, and power projects in the North. They cite projects like the Ajaokuta–Kaduna–Kano gas pipeline, the Kano–Kaduna rail line, and major highway constructions as evidence of balance.
But Kolmani exposes the limits of that defence.
Oil exploration is not a routine infrastructure project. It is upstream, capital-intensive, federally driven, and strategically sensitive. It requires sustained political attention, coordination, and clarity. The fact that the same government capable of mobilising trillions of naira and billions of dollars for projects like the Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway—approved, financed, and flagged off within 18 months—cannot provide a basic timeline for Kolmani nearly three years after its launch raises uncomfortable questions.
This is not about capacity. It is about priority.
Business groups like the Bauchi Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture have accused the Tinubu administration of abandoning Kolmani for political reasons. The Arewa Consultative Forum has spoken of neglect and marginalisation. Whether one agrees with their tone or not, their grievances are rooted in a simple, verifiable fact: Kolmani has not moved.
Every month of delay carries a cost. Inflation pushes projected expenses higher. Restarting stalled operations becomes more expensive. Communities lose faith. A project once hailed as a symbol of inclusion risks becoming a case study in broken promises.
No one has announced that Kolmani is cancelled. But abandonment does not always come with a press release. Sometimes it arrives quietly—through silence, delays, missing timelines, and unanswered appeals.
A government that can find urgency for some projects but only explanations for others cannot claim neutrality. And a nation that allows its most celebrated northern oil discovery to drift indefinitely in administrative fog must confront an uncomfortable truth: neglect does not always shout. Sometimes, it simply waits for everyone to stop asking.
To be continued.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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