Nigerian tycoon Uche Ogah quit banking to build an empire selling petrol, noodles and tricycles

Uche Ogah incorporated Masters Energy Oil and Gas Limited on Feb. 16, 2005 while he was still an assistant general manager at Zenith Bank. He stayed at the bank another two years before leaving to run it.

The group that grew out of it now owns more than fifty filling stations, two petroleum storage depots in Port Harcourt including one with capacity for 158,000 metric tonnes, a 198-hectare industrial estate in rural Abia State, and registered companies in power generation, oil exploration, dredging, commodities trading, property and petrochemicals.

The group was also named in Nigeria's fuel subsidy fraud in 2012, and was later awarded contracts to lift the country's crude oil on behalf of the state.

The banker

Uchechukwu Sampson Ogah was born on Dec. 22, 1969 in Onuaku Uturu, in the Isuikwuato local government area of Abia State. His father, Chief Wilson Ogah, was a sanitary inspector and a retired railway worker. His mother was Ezinne Pauline Ogah.

He attended Ishiagu High School and worked at the West African Examinations Council, which sets and marks school certificates across five countries, from 1986 to 1989.

The qualifications came in layers afterwards. He took an Ordinary National Diploma at the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu in 1992 with an upper credit, a bachelor's degree in banking and finance at Olabisi Onabanjo University in Ago-Iwoye, a postgraduate diploma at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and a master's in business administration.

His national youth service placement was at NAL Bank. He spent about two years at All States Trust Bank before joining Zenith Bank in 1997 and rising to assistant general manager. He resigned in 2007, a decade into banking and two years after registering his own company.

What the group owns

Masters Energy Oil and Gas is the flagship and operates in the downstream and midstream oil sectors, holding a licence from the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority to trade and distribute petroleum products. Downstream covers distribution and retail. Midstream covers storage and movement between the wellhead and the pump.

It runs more than fifty filling stations, concentrated in the south east but extending to Lagos, Edo and Delta states.

The storage is the more substantial asset. The company operates a depot on Nkpor Road in Port Harcourt and a second, larger facility called Masters Energy City on the Rumuolumeni Industrial Layout at Aker Base in Rivers State, which can hold 158,000 metric tonnes of petroleum products and includes a jetty and a logistics centre. Storage capacity at that scale is what separates a fuel importer from a fuel retailer, because it allows a company to hold product and choose when to sell it.

The group's corporate headquarters is at 21 Remi Fani-Kayode Street in Ikeja GRA, Lagos, with an Abuja office on Misratah Street in Wuse 2.

Patience Dappa runs the oil and gas company as chief executive and group managing director.

The estate at Uturu

The manufacturing side sits on land Ogah owns outright in the village he came from.

Masters Energy Industries Limited occupies 198 hectares at Onuaku Uturu in Isuikwuato, and houses five separate businesses. Masters Energy Plastics and PVC makes jerrycans, water storage tanks and household plastic goods. Masters Noodles and Food Processing produces instant noodles, pasta and biscuits. Masters Petrochemicals makes engine oils, industrial oils, brake fluid, coolant, transformer oil, grease and petroleum jelly. Masters Carton and Drymix produces corrugated boxes for industrial customers. Masters Energy Global Automobile assembles tricycles from imported components.

Tricycles, known in Nigeria as keke, are the dominant form of short-distance commercial transport across the south east.

Ogah began building the estate in December 2011, at a point when investment in the region had largely stopped over insecurity and infrastructure failures.

Other companies registered under the group cover power generation, petroleum distribution, oil exploration and production, dredging and marine services, commodities trading including rice imports, and property investment through a vehicle called Etugo Property Limited. Alsa Petrochemical Industries operates as a contractor to oil and gas companies.

The ship that did not exist

Nigeria spent 2.5 trillion naira on fuel subsidy in 2011, roughly ten times the 245 billion naira budgeted for it. The scale of the overrun triggered a parliamentary probe, a presidential task force under the former anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu, and a technical committee set up in 2012 to examine the payments.

More than thirty companies were indicted.

Masters Energy Oil and Gas was among them, and the committee's findings set out a specific transaction. On Oct. 19, 2011, a vessel named MT Zhen Star was recorded as docking in Nigerian waters carrying 58,000 metric tonnes of petrol belonging to Masters Energy and a second company, Caades Oil and Gas. Masters Energy claimed it discharged 28,000 metric tonnes from the vessel in the presence of officials from the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, the Department of Petroleum Resources, the Navy and Customs.

The committee found that MT Zhen Star does not exist.

Fuel subsidy in Nigeria worked by reimbursing importers the difference between the landed cost of petrol and the regulated pump price. A claim on a cargo that never arrived is a claim on money that was never owed.

Only four of more than forty people implicated across the whole scheme have been convicted. Two received ten-year sentences.

Masters Energy continued to do business with the state. It appeared among the companies awarded contracts in 2017 to lift Nigerian crude oil on behalf of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and sell it abroad, one of the most lucrative arrangements available in the Nigerian oil sector, alongside Oando, Eterna Oil and Gas, AMG Petroenergy and Prudent Energy, all of which had also been indicted or were facing charges.

Ogah has not been personally charged in connection with the subsidy matter.

A director in custody

One name on the company's board created a separate problem.

Afam Mallinson Emmanuel Ukatu, chairman and chief executive of the Mallinson Group of Companies, was a director of Masters Energy Oil and Gas Limited, according to BusinessDay, which also listed his directorships at Cowry Assets and Management, Urban Space Services and Alor Microfinance Bank.

The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency arrested him on a flight to Abuja at the Lagos airport on April 13, 2022, after months of surveillance, and announced it publicly on April 25. The agency described him as the businessman behind a 3 billion naira tramadol deal involving Abba Kyari, the suspended deputy commissioner of police who led the Nigeria Police Intelligence Response Team and had separately been indicted in an American internet fraud case.

Tramadol is an opioid painkiller, legal in regulated doses and heavily abused in Nigeria in the higher strengths.

The agency said Ukatu had been importing large consignments in dosages of 120, 200, 225 and 250 milligrams, all of which are illicit, and that in October 2019 alone he brought two containers holding 1,284 cartons through the Apapa ports with a market value above 22 billion naira. Its spokesman Femi Babafemi said Ukatu used pharmaceutical and plastic manufacturing companies as cover and held around 103 bank accounts.

He denies wrongdoing, and the outcome of the case is not established in the reporting available.

The three days he was governor

Ogah contested the Peoples Democratic Party primary for the Abia governorship in December 2014 and lost to Okezie Ikpeazu, who won the 2015 election. He then sued, arguing Ikpeazu had never been qualified to stand.

The case turned on tax. Party guidelines required candidates to show evidence of tax payment for three consecutive years, and Ogah's lawyers argued the documents were false. One receipt recorded a payment made on a Saturday, when tax offices do not open. Another stated an annual taxable income that did not match Ikpeazu's letter of employment.

Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court in Abuja agreed on June 27, 2016. He found Ikpeazu had made false declarations, ruled him ineligible to have contested the primary, declared him guilty of tax evasion, ordered him to vacate office immediately, and directed the electoral commission to issue a certificate of return to Ogah. He awarded Ogah 100,000 naira in costs.

The commission complied on June 30 and handed over the certificate.

The same day, Justice Ambrose Allagoa of the same court, sitting in Owerri, dismissed the allegation as unproven and affirmed that Ikpeazu remained governor. A third judge issued an injunction restraining the commission from handing over a certificate that had already been handed over.

Ikpeazu appealed and served both terms. Ogah never took office.

Politics, then back to business

He left the PDP for the All Progressives Congress, ran for governor again in 2019 and finished second, and was appointed Minister of State for Mines and Steel Development by President Muhammadu Buhari, the junior post overseeing solid minerals.

He was the party's candidate again in the 2023 election.

His younger brother took a different route. Amobi Ogah, born in 1980, won the Isuikwuato and Umunneochi seat in the House of Representatives in 2023 on a Labour Party ticket, taking 11,769 votes against 8,725 for the incumbent from his brother's party. He chairs the House committee on aviation.

Ogah holds two national honours, Officer of the Order of the Niger, awarded in 2014, and the higher Commander of the Order of the Niger. He electrified villages in Uturu, built houses in the community, endowed a chair at Abia State University and funded a 5,000-seat auditorium there. He is an ambassador to the Nigeria-Turkey Chamber of Commerce and Industry.