President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has continually hammered on his administration ambition to achieve a benchmark of a trillion-dollar economy by the end of the decade. This lofty desire has prepped every agency of government to contribute its own quota to make this ambition a reality.
Inside the Council Chamber of the newly renamed General Shehu Musa Yar’adua University of Geological Science and Engineering Technology, the language on 7 August was less about petroleum geology and more about foreign exchange and capacity building.
The Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), Professor Shu’aibu Shehu Aliyu used a press conference on the university’s reforms to make a bigger claim: that training welders, drillers and postgraduate researchers at home is now part of how Nigeria gets to a trillion-dollar economy.
It is an unusual pitch for an agency better known for sponsoring scholarships abroad. But professor Aliyu told reporters the Fund’s two flagship institutions — General Shehu Musa Yar’adua University of Geological Science and Engineering Technology and the Centre for Skills Development and Training in Port Harcourt — exist specifically to keep money that would otherwise leave the country.
“Primarily, these institutions are being established to domesticate training and human capacity development while, at the same time, reducing capital flight,” he said. “This is a major milestone that now forms part of the backbone of PTDF’s institutional capacity.”
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He argued that many other countries in West Africa and across Africa are committed to developing their oil and gas sectors. Therefore, PTDF’s vision for the university is to provide technical skills that can serve the entire West African region and other African countries.
He further disclosed that PTDF is also making efforts to accelerate the full digitalisation of the institution so that it can serve as a catalyst for the exchange of ideas and scholars across the globe.
“We can have scholars physically present here, while others can participate through virtual learning and training. This cannot be achieved without robust and stronger partnerships. In line with this, PTDF has already initiated partnerships with internationally recognised institutions across the globe,” he added.
The numbers behind that claim are worth sitting with. PTDF has for years sent Nigerian scholars to universities in Britain, Canada and the United States for postgraduate training in petroleum-related disciplines, at a cost that runs into tens of millions of dollars annually once tuition, stipends and forex conversion are added up. Every scholar trained at Kaduna instead of Aberdeen or Houston is, in the Fund’s arithmetic, dollars that stay in Nigeria’s reserves rather than leaving through the scholarship pipeline.
That logic sits comfortably alongside President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and the 2026-2030 National Development Plan, which targets a $1 trillion GDP economy by the end of the decade.
PTDF’s leadership was explicit about the connection, closing its formal address by tying the institution’s fortunes to “the continuous support and strategic guidance of President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR renewed Hope Agenda and the 2026-2030 National Development Plan target of $1 trillion GDP economy.”
The renaming itself carries political weight. What was formerly the College of Petroleum and Energy Studies is now a full postgraduate university, licensed by the National Universities Commission and rebranded by presidential directive after the late Second Republic figure Shehu Musa Yar’adua.
PTDF’s Executive Secretary framed the move as proof of commitment from the top. “The recent presidential announcement to rename this college as the newly designated university demonstrates the political commitment of His Excellency to fully realise the potential of this national asset,” he told the room. “This aligns with the President’s vision under the Renewed Hope Agenda.”
Beneath the ceremony sits a genuinely awkward mechanism: the split-site doctoral programme, under which scholars split their study between Kaduna and a partner university in the United Kingdom, sometimes a year here and two abroad, sometimes the reverse. Students walk away with two degrees, one Nigerian and one foreign, while PTDF pays a fraction of what full overseas sponsorship would cost. “This will give the student the opportunity to acquire two degrees,” the Executive Secretary said, adding that the arrangement is designed to “reduce capital flight and also strengthen the capacity of local institutions.”
He was careful not to oversell self-sufficiency. Some specialisations simply do not exist at scale in Nigeria yet, and PTDF will keep sending people abroad for those. “There will, however, be exceptions for critical skills that we do not currently have domestically,” he conceded. “In such cases, we will still have to send people abroad for specialised training.”
The Fund is also stitching the university into Nigeria’s live energy pipeline, rather than leaving it to train generically. Officials named the AKK Gas Pipeline, the UTM Floating LNG project and the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline as projects the institution is building workforce capacity for, alongside emerging fields such as Bonga Southwest Aparo, Owowo, Zabazaba-Etan, the OB3 Gas Trunk Line and Olokola LNG.
Partnerships are being pursued with the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization, Algeria’s Sonatrach, Saudi Aramco and Turkish research institutions, an attempt, the executive secretary said, to plug Nigerian graduates into a wider West African and continental industry rather than a purely domestic one.
That continental framing came through most forcefully from Dr Umar Farouk Ibrahim, the committee chairman tasked with reviewing the university’s structure and mandate.
A former Secretary-General of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization and one-time OPEC staffer, Ibrahim rooted PTDF’s mission not in economics but in energy geopolitics.
He pointed to the 2015 Paris climate agreement as the moment Western institutions began retreating from fossil-fuel research and financing. “What that meant was that institutions such as Imperial College London and many institutions in the United States and Canada decided that they would no longer fund oil and gas research,” he said. “Some even decided to close their faculties of oil and gas because they were concentrating on renewable energy.”
For a continent sitting on what he put at more than 123 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of gas, that retreat is a problem, not a victory. Ibrahim noted that roughly a billion Africans still lack access to modern energy and around 600 million have no electricity at all, even as external funders push the continent toward renewables.
“If you say you don’t want to move, that is fine,” he said. “But they can stop the funding, end the marketing support and, ultimately, you lose the technology. Whatever resources you have in the ground become meaningless because it is only when you are able to extract, process and utilise them that they become energy.”
He said Africa risks losing control of the financing, technology and markets tied to its own resources unless institutions like PTDF’s university build that capability domestically. The committee, he said, has been given two weeks to report back, though PTDF’s leadership acknowledged that timeline “is not sacrosanct” and depends on what investigators find on the ground.
Nigeria’s forex reserves have been under sustained pressure for years, and every dollar not spent sponsoring a scholar in Aberdeen is a dollar that, in theory, stays home. What PTDF is really betting on is that Nigeria’s energy transition problem and its foreign exchange problem are the same problem, solvable with the same institution.
Sunday Michael Ogwu is a Nigerian journalist and editor of Pinnacle Daily. He is known for his work in business and economic reporting. He has held editorial roles in prominent Nigerian media outlets, where he has focused on economic policy, financial markets, and developmental issues affecting Nigeria and Africa more broadly.