The new owner sees an acquisition. The community sees continuity. In oil and gas, that gap can become expensive.
On 22 August 2024, Oando announced that it had completed its $783 million acquisition of Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NAOC) from Eni. The deal transferred licences, infrastructure and a long operating history. In Omoku, Rivers State, that history included electricity. The Guardian reported in November 2025 that company-funded power had reached homes, schools, hospitals and small businesses for “over 30 years”. The report gives no start year.
On 30 October 2025, according to the same report, Oando wrote to the Omoku City Council of Traditional Rulers and Chiefs. The letter, signed by a general manager and copied to the regulators, said that with the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021 transition period over, Oando would stop routine maintenance of the community’s electricity network. It cited Section 316(1) of the Act and said responsibility “now rests fully with the Ogba Host Communities Development Trust”. The newspaper’s headline said Oando had ended free power. The letter says something narrower: Oando was withdrawing from maintenance. Whether residents will become metered customers of the distribution company, and when, was not settled in the report. Oando said it remained committed to host communities through the trust structure. The regulators had not replied.
Both readings are defensible. That is the point.
The PIA changed how community development is organised. Instead of operators deciding what to give, a fixed percentage of operating expenditure goes into a trust that the communities govern. A company that moves a legacy programme into that structure is following the law, at least as far as the Act itself goes.
But a community does not experience an acquisition through a share-purchase agreement. It experiences what happens next. Does the light stay on? Does the clinic function? Are local people still employed? Is anyone answering when something fails?
For three decades the electricity had no clause, no renewal date and no successor. It was a practice. A practice cannot be transferred in a sale, because it appears on no schedule. The owner changed. Nobody had written down what the previous owner’s habit meant, and so nobody could say what it meant for the next one.
The Act is not the whole of the law. The 2022 Host Communities Development Regulations set out how the transfer is to work. Regulation 40 requires the settlor to make arrangements for the effective transfer of existing projects and schemes, including those under any memorandum of understanding or other agreement, and to transfer their assets and liabilities to the fund. It then adds a duty that Oando’s letter does not mention: the settlor must “ensure the continued execution of all development projects or schemes” so transferred “by the Fund”.
That wording points both ways. It places the work of execution with the fund, which supports Oando’s reading that the trust is now responsible. It also keeps a duty on the settlor to ensure the work continues, which supports the community’s reading that the company cannot simply declare the responsibility moved. Two questions decide which reading holds. The first is whether a community electricity network counts as a “development project or scheme” under the regulations; that depends on how NAOC and Oando documented and described it. The second is whether the transfer was actually completed, given reports that the Ogba trust is still building its capacity. No regulator ruling or court decision on this fact pattern has been found.
Two weeks after the Omoku letter, stakeholders of Oando’s host communities in the same local government area met in Omoku. Their communiqué, reported on 20 November 2025, asked Oando to keep supplying electricity. It also alleged a plan to terminate more than 300 workers from host communities, an attempt to revoke contracts held by indigenous contractors, and a decline in community development since the takeover. They gave the company seven days. The report carries no reply from Oando. These are the forum’s claims. A different group, the Ijaw Diaspora Council, separately criticised a reported plan to lay off over 450 inherited NAOC staff after a 2025 half-year performance evaluation. That is a different figure from a different source, and the two should not be merged. Neither claim has been confirmed by a company document. Oando’s managing director for its Nigerian subsidiary told the Guardian that the firm “has not terminated the jobs of the 450 workers” and said a fuller statement would follow. That addresses whether terminations have happened. The report does not quote him denying that a plan exists.
In August 2026, communities in Okpai, Beneku and Umusadege in Delta State protested over the 3% of operating expenditure that the PIA requires operators to pay into their trust. They allege the money for 2024, 2025 and 2026 has not been released. The reports give no figures and no response from Oando. They establish the allegation and the demand, not a breach.
This matters because the 3% is a statutory duty, not discretionary CSR. A company can lawfully move a legacy service into the new structure and still face a different grievance if the communities believe the statutory money has not arrived. One month earlier, in July 2026, a separate trust for seven other communities, involving the Energia–Oando joint venture, was inaugurated, and a state official praised the company for contributing “beyond the statutory requirement”. The same company appears in a ceremony and in a protest, depending on which community is asked.
Some readers will ask whether this is a problem peculiar to indigenous companies. The evidence does not support a simple answer.
Agip was not free of the same disputes. In 2017, the Egebekiri community in Bayelsa protested at an NAOC flow station, saying the company had paid no royalties in over 40 years. Eni replied that another family also claimed ownership of the land and would be included among the stakeholders. Chevron, which is not Nigerian-owned, faced a 2019 protest by Ugborodo communities over alleged neglect and disputed the allegations, citing its scholarships, medical services and local contracts.
Among Nigerian operators, Seplat faced a protest in November 2024 from the Abigborodo and Obotie communities in Delta State. They said Seplat refused to recognise them as host communities under the PIA and was operating about two kilometres from their territory. Seplat denied this on 3 December 2024. Its spokesman said its host communities in that area are Ugbukurusu and Sapele-Okpe, that records from the previous operator do not list the protesting communities as hosts, that it has acquired no land from them, and that the protesters did not attend a mediation meeting convened by the Delta State government on 28 November. The two accounts differ on whether the communities are hosts at all, which is the question the PIA now makes decisive.
The Dangote Group shows a different version of the same gap. In August 2023, BusinessDay quoted chiefs in Agbon-Segun, Okeyanta and Okesegun praising the refinery’s roads, boreholes and scholarships. A week earlier, the advocacy group CAPPA had held a dialogue with representatives of communities named Magbonsegun, Okesegun and Okeiyanta. They said they had been without grid power for more than ten years, that most boreholes had failed, and that land had been taken without compensation. CAPPA’s report carries no response from Dangote. The names overlap, so one reading is that two groups in the same places had very different experiences. The other is that the question was asked differently. Separately, a 2024 suit in a Lagos federal court asks the state government, not Dangote, where the refinery land money went.
None of these companies needs to be called bad. What they share is more useful than who owns them. In each case, what the community believed it had was not held in a form that could be enforced against a new owner, a new law or a new policy.
Financial due diligence asks what assets are being bought. Legal due diligence asks what liabilities come with them. Operational due diligence asks whether the business can be run.
Few ask what expectations are being inherited. They live in community memory, in the minutes of old meetings, in the promises of departed executives, and in services that have run so long that nobody calls them a service. They may appear in no document. They still affect whether the operation can run.
An acquirer that wants to avoid the Omoku outcome has to do what could be called expectation integration. It has to find out what the community believes it was promised, compare that with what the law now requires, and design the change instead of announcing it. That includes asking whether the body receiving a responsibility, here a newly formed trust, can actually carry it. If the answer is no, the disruption is not an unforeseen public-relations problem. It was a predictable transition risk.
None of this means every historic benefit must continue forever, or that companies should act as governments. It means a change that affects people’s daily lives is a design task, and it is judged by what the people living with it experience.
The same pattern appears wherever an operation changes hands after decades: a mine, a port, a utility, a plant. The asset moves in a day. The relationship around it does not.
Based on published reports up to 9 October 2026. The companies’ positions are given as reported. Allegations are those of the communities and groups named.