Between July 2022 and October 2023, Tijjani Yahaya Kaura served as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Oil and Gas Free Zones Authority, the agency responsible for Nigeria’s oil and gas free trade zones. It was his first executive role inside the federal bureaucracy after eight years split between the Senate and, before that, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

An agenda built on three words

On taking office, Kaura was explicit about what he intended to prioritise: corporate governance, transparency and accountability. In practice, that meant treating investor confidence as something the Authority had to earn continuously rather than assume, and it meant naming the actual obstacles rather than the polite ones. He identified inadequate security around the zones as one of the principal factors deterring investment, and moved to build direct working relationships with the communities hosting free zone operations, on the reasoning that an investor’s confidence in a zone tracks the confidence of the people living around it.

Continuity, not a change of subject

Fifteen months is not a long tenure, but it was long enough to establish a pattern that shows up again in his later appointment to chair NEPZA’s board: engage the host community first, treat governance as the product rather than the paperwork around it, and measure success by whether investment actually stays.

The throughline to Inland Drills

The same three ideas, govern before you’re asked to, engage the community before the equipment arrives, and treat transparency as infrastructure, are the operating principles Kaura carried into founding Inland Drills Nigeria Ltd. A company built by someone who has run a federal regulator does not treat licensing and community relations as afterthoughts.