By Toyin Akinosho
TONY Attah, outgoing Managing Director of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Ltd, dismisses the misgivings that the company is hurt by criticism of the Nigerian Prize for Literature, which it sponsors.
“I don’t know where that perception comes from (that the company has considered dropping the sponsorship)”, Attah told bookartville.com in the company’s Abuja office. “But wherever it is coming from, it is very wide and completely away from the current reality and I will like to put that on record”.
Attah is preparing to hand over the job to Philip Mshelbila, who is rounding off his tenure as CEO, Atlantic LNG Company of Trinidad & Tobago.
The Nigeria Prize for Literature is the richest prize in African literature, worth One Hundred Thousand American Dollars ($100,000). It was launched in 2004 to honour literary erudition by Nigerian authors. The 18th annual prize is currently being contested. There was no competition in 2020, because of the pandemic. The winner of the NPL is officially the most literate Nigerian of the given year.
The management strategy of the award judgment, the breadth of its influence and the upside it has for its winners, compared with other such awards on the continent, have all been under scrutiny by the writing community.
“I think that we are not afraid of criticism and that is the truth. What we probably worry about is if it is not constructive because if it is not, it is value eroding and not value adding. Anything that has potential to add value, even if it is not visible to us today, but at least it forces us to think, we are okay”.
Attah, a Mechanical engineer by training, who was previously Managing Director of Shell Nigeria Exploration Producing Company SNEPCo, says he had an inkling of the broad sketch of what the awards were about before he took charge of the company, the largest industrial enterprise in West Africa. “Before I came here, I was invited by one of the earlier MDs to attend one of the literature awards. I remember just sitting there and taking it all in. I am science oriented and an engineer but just sitting there and asking myself some of these questions like why would a corporation that is innovative in technology do this?”.
The NLNG converts three billion standard cubic feet of natural gas every day (3Bscf/d), mined from reservoirs in the Niger Delta basin, into liquid form through refrigeration. This comes to 22Million Metric Tonnes Per Year (22MMTPA), produced in six plants (Trains), in Bonny, Rivers State. The company transports “large bottles” of this liquid on sea going vessels to customers around the world, mainly in Europe and Asia.
The Nigeria Prize for Literature has rotated among four literary genres, including Prose Fiction, Poetry, Drama and Children’s Literature, since inception. This means that the Prize focuses on each of the genres every four years. The 2020 Call for entries, which has now become 2021 Call was for Prose Fiction. 11 novels have been shortlisted out of 202 contestants. “We are quite confident about our position and the value that we bring to the country and to the world and I would say that the purpose of this company is to deliver energy to the world”, Attah says.
Attah was appointed in 2016, for a first three-year term, now running into five years, to lead NLNG Ltd. In his third year, in 2019, he delivered on the most crucial item on his to do list; he led the company to a Final Investment Decision (FIV D) on the company’s seventh LNG Train (Plant), which will produce Eight Million Metric Tonnes Per Annum (8MMTPA) of Liquefied Natural Gas, which loosely converts to 1.1Billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. To put it in context, the new plant will consume about one seventh of all the gas that is produced in Nigeria today. The current NLNG operations already take in about 40% of the entire national output. It’s a massive enterprise.
The fifth Managing Director of the NLNG since the Prize was inaugurated, Attah says: “it is in recognition of the vision of helping to build a better Nigeria” that the NPL was inaugurated, “because we really we would ask ourselves the question how do you help build a better Nigeria? Every year $100,000 for the literary world for the prize for literature and it sort of spreads the message faster and farther. The truth is that we actually have three prizes which include the Science Prize which is also $100,000 but somehow, people here only know of the literature prize. If it was that the science prize was lower, I would have said okay, maybe that was the reason but it is the same $100,000.There is another one which is the criticism prize. But it would seem that people are shy about that because that hasn´t really done well but I can assure you that as a company, we continue to push the frontier and boundaries on these three prizes. So it is not about the money for us as you can see from the categories that I have mentioned.
“These prizes will outlive any MD because it is part of our DNA in supporting Nigeria on the literary and science fronts and it´s a no brainer to explain why.
“I can assure you that the company remains committed to doing this because we have done it now for 17 years now and the 18th one is coming up in October so you have to make it a point to be there “.
He said he wanted to take the opportunity of his office to “accentuate the science prize because it is important to us. Several years ago, it was about malaria and it turned out that there were three groups that jointly won it. That was far reaching for me. We have pursued innovations in electric power generation. Nigeria is full of innovators that are uncovered. Look at the story of the girl from Anambra who had not seen a computer before and someone sponsored her to Yale (an Ivy League University in the U.S) for a competition and she acquitted herself very well. You can now see the potential in this country which will stay untapped without an enabler like us.
“So, it is our responsibility to open up the development in science and literature with these little prizes and I think your media organization should connect more with the science prize as well”.
