The Family of Our Sage, Agagu- Mama, YHE Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan- Former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, His Excellency, Mokgweetsi E. K. Masisi, Former President of the Republic of Botswana, Former Governor of Ogun State/Senator- Ogun East Senatorial District- Otunba Gbenga Daniel, The Chairman & members of the Board of Trustees of the Olusegun Agagu Foundation (Dr Adedeji Adeleke), our mother, Chief Mrs. Sinatu Ojikutu (the pathfinder for many of her strong-willed and independent daughters), Chief Mrs. Magaret Shonekan, Chief Mrs Nike Akande, Members of the Lagos State Executives present, AIG (Rtd) Tunji Alapini, distinguished guests.
A memorial lecture asks something of those of us entrusted with public responsibility: what will work better for our people because we served?
Dr Olusegun Agagu’s life gives that question particular meaning. A geologist, entrepreneur, minister and governor, he moved comfortably between science, business and public service — worlds we too often keep apart.
He understood the value beneath our feet. But he also understood that the true measure of leadership is what that value makes possible for people.
And that is why today’s theme is so fitting. Africa has extraordinary natural and human endowments. Our opportunity now is to convert more of that inheritance into productive investment, stronger industries, better jobs and enduring prosperity.
Resources are an inheritance. Prosperity is a responsibility.
Africa has the land, the resources and the talent. Yet too often, our crops leave in sacks, our minerals leave unprocessed, and our young people leave in search of opportunity. The finished goods return—with someone else’s brand, at a premium we pay
Take cocoa in Ondo State—home to the Agagu family and to me. Our farmers tend the trees, harvest the pods and dry the beans. But the journey from a sack of cocoa to a beautifully wrapped bar of chocolate creates wealth that too often accumulates elsewhere.
The harvest is ours. Too much of the prosperity is not.
That is a problem to solve, not a lament to sustain. From the farm to the mine to the wellhead, our ambition must extend to the factories, the skills and the brands that turn raw materials into lasting wealth.
President Masisi, Botswana offers an important lesson. Diamond revenues helped build schools, hospitals and roads. And when De Beers moved its international diamond sales from London to Gaborone in 2013, Botswana brought more expertise and commercial activity closer to the resource.
The opportunity is not only to process what we have. It is to build more of the businesses around it.
For years, Nigeria exported crude and bought back fuel. The Dangote Refinery is changing that relationship. Built through sustained private investment, it now supplies African and international markets. In June and July this year, it was Europe’s largest external supplier of jet fuel.
Think of what a refinery makes possible beyond the products it sells: the welder on the construction site, the engineer in the control room, the haulage company delivering supplies, the caterer feeding the workforce. With each competitive project, more Nigerians can earn a living from an industry that once did more of its work elsewhere.
But projects of this scale do not emerge from ambition alone. Government and business have to understand each other.
Whether the investment is in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, medicines or energy, public policy belongs inside business strategy. Equally, government must understand how capital is raised, risk is priced and a project becomes viable.
My career as an energy investor, reformer and policy adviser has taught me that this relationship works best when public purpose and commercial discipline reinforce each other.
Access should improve the rules, not exempt the well-connected from them. Government must reward productivity, not proximity to power.
Under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s mandate, my team and I have brought ministries, regulators and investors together to address the obstacles holding back investment: uncompetitive terms, long delays, high costs and uncertain decisions. That requires respect for contracts and rules investors can trust beyond any one administration.
Contracting timelines have been cut by more than half. More than US$10 billion in final investment decisions have followed since 2023. A much larger upstream opportunity pipeline—exceeding US$50 billion—lies ahead. That pipeline is not yet committed capital. Our task is to turn opportunity into investment, and investment into work Nigerians can see and income they can earn.
The new deep-offshore framework also prioritises commercially and technically feasible work in Nigeria. A fabrication yard should emerge from one project better equipped and qualified for the next. That is how an investment helps build an industry.
Gas can extend that opportunity across the economy: heat for a food processor, feedstock for fertiliser, power for a factory. Alongside renewables and stronger grids, it can help more African businesses compete.
The benefits must reach into the home too. For a woman cooking over firewood, cleaner cooking can mean less smoke and time returned to her day. But a cylinder she cannot afford to refill is not a solution. Availability and affordability have to advance together.
There will be no African industrialisation without reliable power.
We cannot ask our factories to compete with the world while leaving them to overcome the electricity system on their own.
Nigeria’s Electricity Act of 2023 has opened the way for states to regulate their own electricity markets. But legal reform must be matched by a market that can pay its bills.
Complementing that legislative milestone in Nigeria’s power sector is fiscal reform – the most ambitious that we have seen in a while. Just today, we signed the second tranche of bonds to clear the legacy debt owed to power generation and gas companies, within a programme authorised for up to 4 trillion. Working with the Ministry of Finance and our partners, we are rebuilding confidence across that commercial chain.
Settling old debts is necessary. Preventing new ones is just as important. Better metering, lower losses, payment discipline and properly funded protection for vulnerable consumers must work together.
There is a skills dividend too. Through PMI Power Force, we are targeting the training of 5,000 young Nigerians in meter installation. This is where the Foundation’s mission meets ours: education must lead to opportunity, and opportunity must lead to a livelihood.
Our ambition must also cross borders. The West African Gas Pipeline already connects Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana. Regional power pools can allow one country’s supply to support another’s industry
The proposed Atlantic pipeline towards Morocco must meet the same practical test: affordable supply, credible customers and financing that can sustain delivery. We need not wait to become rich before we trade with one another. Trading with one another is part of how we become rich.
That means making the African Continental Free Trade Area work in practice —through shared infrastructure, easier movement of goods and markets large enough to support competitive businesses.
Keeping more value in Africa does not require keeping every stage within one national border. The same discipline must guide our critical-minerals opportunity. Lithium, cobalt and manganese should be the beginning of an industrial strategy, not simply a new export list. Nasarawa’s lithium-processing investment points towards that ambition.
The test is sustained production, competitive businesses and local livelihoods—not only a commissioning ceremony.
For Nigeria and Botswana alike, resource wealth should finance other sources of strength. We must build skills and businesses that remain valuable when a commodity’s price falls - or its deposits run out.
But there is one test above all others: are these reforms translating into better lives? Nigeria's economic foundations are strengthening, and the task before us now is to carry those gains all the way to the household. Stronger reserves, rising investment and improving macroeconomic indicators matter because they create the conditions for jobs, lower costs, better services and greater opportunity.
That is why President Tinubu's reform agenda has never been reform for reform's sake. The objective is a stronger economy that works better for Nigerians.
We also know that transitions of this scale are demanding. Families are managing food, transport, school fees and energy costs today. Our responsibility is to stay the course on reforms that secure the future while using every tool available to ease the transition, protect the vulnerable and accelerate the benefits.
The next phase is about transmission: turning macroeconomic stability into household prosperity; investment into jobs; stronger public finances into better services; and economic reform into a better daily experience for Nigerians.
That is how credibility is earned. Investors must see a country where the rules are clear and durable. Citizens must see a government whose reforms are opening possibilities for them.
Those are not competing objectives. They are the same promise viewed from different sides. Dr Agagu’s Roadmap to Progress set out objectives and timelines against which citizens could judge performance. That is a standard worth renewing.
President Tinubu has named the projects we are delivering, the skills we are building and the services we are improving. We will publish milestones and account for the results.
Government and business are partners in this work. But the citizen is not an observer. The citizen is the reason for it. Our resources must do more than make our countries valuable to the world. They must make life better for the people who live in them.
That is how Africa’s resources become Africa’s prosperity. And that is how we honour this Foundation’s enduring charge: to leave things better than we met them.
Thank you