The Executive Chairman and Founder of AA Holdings Ltd., Mr. Austin Avuru, has warned indigenous operators that asset acquisition alone will not translate to barrels without matching investment, infrastructure and execution muscle.
Avuru gave the warning while speaking at the high-level strategic panel session of the 2026 NAEC Energy Conference organised by the Association of Energy Correspondents of Nigeria [NAEC] in Lagos, themed “Access to Assets: Empowering Players and Driving Growth.
“For investors watching Nigeria’s divestment-driven upstream boom, Avuru’s message was blunt: the real bottleneck has shifted from access to delivery.
“You had established capacity. You were in business. You just didn’t get access,” he said, recalling how infrastructure constraints historically choked even capable players from monetising assets.
He recounted the long, tortuous process of building evacuation infrastructure to bring acquired assets to market, stressing that poor infrastructure remains a major drag on value realisation.
He noted “We were struggling to build a pipeline to build assets, to realise. Can you imagine how long it took?” Avuru said.
According to him, converting petroleum assets into productive investments requires a broader access framework — access to gas, access to infrastructure, and critically, access to finance.\
For the investor community, his intervention spotlights the execution risk now facing Nigeria’s indigenous upstream. While the PIA and recent divestments have opened the asset door for local players, the ability to fund drilling, build pipelines, replace reserves through exploration, and sustain production will determine returns.
Avuru called for deliberate strengthening of exploration investment and execution capacity to sustain future production, warning that without it, Nigeria’s production growth ambitions will stall.
He added that access to global financing will remain critical as operators seek long-term capital to develop assets, scale output and unlock gas value — a signal to financiers that the Nigerian upstream story is moving from asset transfer to capital-intensive execution.
Other panelist include Mrs. Cecilia Ajayi ,President, Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE), Mr Wole Ogunsanya, Chairman of the Petroleum Technology Association of Nigeria (PETAN) , Mrs. Alero Balogun, General Manager, Corporate Communications, Oando Plc,and Chike Nwosu, Group Chief Executive officer, HSI Energies Ltd who moderated the session.
Comment here