TOYIN AKINOSHO AND HIS PENT-UP RAGE

By Lawal Itodo

I am genuinely amused, bordering on astonishment, at how low some individuals are willing to stoop, and even more entertained by the hastily assembled, yet astonishingly shoddy piece recently penned by Toyin Akinosho.

Looking back with a theatrical eye-roll, it becomes painfully obvious that the man is, once again, flat broke and frantically scavenging for any corner from which he can squeeze a few crumbs for survival.

What he has produced here is nothing short of a monumental disaster—an epic, legendary train-wreck of an article that belongs nowhere but the nearest rubbish bin. Cute attempt, Toyin, but clearly not the work of anyone who bothered to think for more than thirty seconds.

Let us speak plainly: Toyin Akinosho has always lived off others. He has never been a serious thinker, never put in the hard yards for anything he claims to own, and has spent a lifetime hunting for the path of least resistance out of the self-inflicted chaos he calls a career.

A geologist by training, he later morphed into a so-called writer and publisher—purely for the money, of course, and with a generous side helping of petty blackmail—wielding the supposed power of the fourth estate like a cheap cudgel. This pivot came only after he had floundered spectacularly in the pitch-black abyss of grinding poverty, penury, and hunger that swallowed every earlier venture he touched.

No surprise, then, that even at his advanced age he remains a walking joke, a comical relic who, incredibly, cannot even state with certainty how old he actually is—a classic symptom of the intellectually indolent who have nothing better to do than loiter around “cleverly” pilfering other people’s work.

It is precisely this unsavoury habit that recently drove him to lift huge chunks of content straight from the website of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) so he could pad out and sell copies of his rag, the African Oil and Gas Report. And let’s be honest: in an industry that churns out fresh headlines every single day, the best Toyin can manage is stale, recycled, month-old gossip served up in his amateur broadsheet mischievously called Festac News and Community Tabloid.

Sadly for him, he is only ever clever by half. This particular survival hustle has long passed its sell-by date; it has reached its natural limit, slammed into a solid brick wall, and collapsed in a heap.

Who on earth is unaware of the extraordinary, unassailable achievements of the NUPRC and the superlative performance it has delivered over the past two years alone? We are talking about an unbroken string of signature successes and unrivalled pace-setting milestones that crystallised in 2024 as an absolute blockbuster year for the Commission—soaring revenues, massive production increases, and a ferocious investment drive powered by systematic transparency, aggressive containment of oil theft, and the near-elimination of routine gas flaring.

Production has climbed from 1.46 million barrels per day in October 2024 to 1.78 million barrels per day in 2025, with the ambitious Project 1 Million Barrels per Day now firmly on track to deliver an additional full million barrels daily above the baseline.

Is he somehow unaware of the explosive rig-count surge from a pathetic eight active rigs in 2021 to thirty-six today—and heading toward seventy, with more than forty already drilling—putting the Commission comfortably on course to hit its fifty-rig target by the end of 2025?

Does he pretend not to have noticed the revolutionary data and transparency reforms, the upgraded National Data Repository (NDR) now enriched with 11,000 square kilometres of fresh 3D seismic data (part of the monumental 56,000 sq km Awalé Project) plus information from more than 10,000 wells? Or the forthcoming licensing round launching on 1 December 2025, universally praised in advance for being fully digitalised and transparently run? Or the staggering 2024 revenue haul of ₦12.25 trillion—an eye-watering 182% leap over 2023 and a full ₦5 trillion above projection—publicly celebrated by the prestigious Energy Governance Alliance for single-handedly restoring regulatory credibility to Nigeria’s upstream sector?

Do I really need to jog his memory about the masterstroke regulatory reforms anchored on the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) of 2021—reforms that have delivered crystal-clear fiscal terms, investor-friendly processes, and a suite of gazetted regulations on gas flaring, royalties, and production curtailment that industry stakeholders have openly applauded?

While a handful of serial detractors and professional wailers like Toyin Akinosho rush to press with half-baked, poorly researched hatchet jobs, the rest of the world has moved on, showering praise on the NUPRC and restoring rock-solid investor confidence through landmark partnerships with TGS-PetroData, multi-client seismic campaigns, a $20 billion field-development pipeline, and a great deal more besides.

Yes, challenges remain—legacy infrastructural bottlenecks, the enforcement of gas-flaring penalties (₦391 billion collected against a ₦126 billion target), occasional murmurs about data-release timelines—but the Commission is surmounting every single one at speed and repositioning Nigeria as the undisputed data-rich, investment-ready powerhouse not just of Africa’s upstream sector but of the entire global industry. The numbers speak for themselves: deliberate, progressive, and impossible to argue with.

In 2024 alone, revenue hit ₦12.25 trillion—up 182% from ₦4.34 trillion in 2023 and ₦5 trillion above the projected ₦6.93 trillion. The same year delivered an 84.2% year-on-year growth rate—the highest in three years. Crude output averaged 1.65 million barrels per day and continues climbing, propelled by the Project 1 Million Barrels per Day initiative that is targeting 2.5 million barrels per day by 2027.

Seventy-nine ambitious Field Development Plans were approved between 2024 and 2025, unlocking approximately $40 billion in potential investment while driving rig count from eight to sixty-nine by October 2025—a staggering 760% increase that screams renewed investor confidence.

Twenty-four new regulations were gazetted under the PIA, bidding processes went fully digital, gas-flare penalties soared to ₦391 billion, signature bonuses brought in ₦369 billion, and ₦358 billion was disbursed to oil-and-gas host communities, funding 536 projects, calming restiveness, and slashing crude theft from 102,900 barrels per day in 2021 to a remarkable 9,600 barrels per day by September 2025.

For this relentless drive and leadership, the NUPRC has rightly collected a shelf-full of awards in 2024 alone: SERVICOM Overall Best Performing Parastatal, four separate awards including Best Performing PSU Team B, personal recognition for the Chief Executive Engr. Gbenga Komolafe, the Best MDA in Digital Transformation award at the Nigeria GOVTECH Conference (for the game-changing Drill-or-Drop policy that activated 400 dormant fields), the Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme that attracted $2.5 billion in private investment, and, of course, global acclaim for the Project 1 Million Barrels per Day launched in October 2024 at a record 2.7 million barrels per day capacity.

So, Toyin, a word of friendly advice: next time you decide to lift content wholesale from the NUPRC website to sell your little papers overseas, at least try to be a little more artful about it. The Commission’s website and social-media handles remain an impregnable fortress of verified, unassailable fact that no amount of your creative rewriting can dent. By all means keep helping yourself to the material—it’s there, it’s free, and it obviously keeps food on your table and a roof over your family’s head in America. Far better that than exposing your desperation to the whole world with this kind of amateurish outburst.

Attempting to smear the NUPRC today is an exercise in futility; the institution has been run with exemplary competence and transparency these past few years. You and your fellow travellers in the cottage industry of fraud and blackmail would do well to stop stealing and monetising the Commission’s industry data—or at the very least show a little gratitude for the free raw material you have been gifted for years.

Turning your personal frustrations, serial failures, and bottled-up anger into yet another unsellable rant achieves nothing except reminding everyone how generously the same industry you now attack has kept you comfortable: sitting in far-away America, copying and pasting data, and converting it into dollars without ever breaking a sweat.

Perhaps it is time to accept that some stories simply cannot be spun, no matter how loudly you shout.

Itodo is a public affairs analyst writing from Port Harcourt.