Peter Mbah: The Story from Obscurity to Dominance

For the self-effacing goal-getter behind Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, Mr. Peter Mbah, who turned 50 years recently, it takes a combination of vision, grit, tenacity, diligence, self-discipline and managerial acumen to emerge from relative obscurity to become a dominant player in the downstream sector of the petroleum industry. Vanessa Obioha reports.

At a talk delivered to students of Godfrey Okoye University in Enugu, Enugu State, Peter Ndubuisi Mbah, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, an indigenous oil and gas company, in the bid to mentor the students and assure them that, no matter their current existential limitations, they could have a handshake with the sky. That summed up his trajectory in life and his rise to becoming one of the most dominant players in the oil industry in Nigeria. Mbah just clocked 50 years in March 2022.

In his unassuming, penetrating sotto voce remarks, Mbah began by taking a shuttle into the thorn field of life he had walked through, barefooted.

“What you have asked me to do this evening is essentially to tell my story, especially the narrative of the most recent phase of my life which I call the midlife struggle. I will be relying, for my short talk with you this evening, on Joe Girard’s imperishable quip which says that the elevator to success is out of order; you will have to use the stairs … one step at a time.”

According to Mbah, his life trajectory exemplifies the short, calculated steps of the ladder. “The steps were taken smoothly, the next taken with great pains and discomfort and two other next steps lifted as if taking smooth steps… that was part of my life from the outset.”

Today, Mbah’s Pinnacle is one of the industry’s leading players which has succeeded in eliminating multiple handling of operations in the oil industry space. Mbah’s Pinnacle owns one of the largest oil facilities in Nigeria today, with a world-class monstrous storage facility that has enabled the industry to cut down immensely on costs and turn-around time in operation. The company also offers one of the largest offshore liquid bulk terminals in Africa and is creating values through excellent services.

Young Peter commenced schooling at the Army Children’s School, Bori Camp, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, at a tender age of five and attracted school-wide attention for his brilliance. Promoted to skip Elementary Three due to his brilliance, Peter began to read biographies while in Elementary school, chief of which was This Life, a bulky biography of legendary Hollywood actor, Sidney Poitier, the first Black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor in 1964 for his role in Lilies of the Field. This Life is the narrative of how a poor young man from the Bahamas, who couldn’t speak good English, came to the US, cleaning the streets, going to shops to beg and who eventually got a job as a cleaner. Poitier eventually improved himself and got to win an Oscar. This story, at the tender age he read the book, inspired Peter to aim for the top, no matter the huge existential limitations confronting him at the time.

This same man, at 12 years old, was the small boy who, with a distinction in the First School Leaving Examination, when his parents were at a financial crossroads because his admittance to college would mean the stoppage of his siblings’ schooling, confidently told his mom he would rather drop out of school to start trading than have their schooling halted. He was thereafter seconded to a family friend in Lagos, from their Port Harcourt base, to live and work as an apprentice electronics boy at Alaba Market.

Rising to the pinnacle of his career has not been a tea party for Mbah. Armed with an LLB from the University of East London, a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the IESE University of Navarra, Spain and a string of other degrees he has had, Peter acquired his business knack from the beginning.

In his words, “I have packaged into this short life of mine a lot of grits, frustration, disappointments, rough tackles but each with very strong determination.” Explaining the business mogul and boardroom czar that he later became, Peter said of himself, “I am a man you can sum up his life story as one who has an eye for the unusual and who runs the race of life with an amazing vigour.”

Those who are amazed seeing that young Peter at the top today will further be stupefied that he started the quest for the top from a very humble beginning as a trader of all sorts.

“After doing this for a while, I found out I had saved enough money to stand on my own. My path then crossed with a company in Germany which started sending me Mercedes Benz parts. I sold them here in Nigeria and repatriated their money to Germany, as I did earlier on,” he said.

Then, another opportunity presented itself. The young Peter began to represent another company from Turkey and rose to become its sole representative. The company was shipping its goods to him and after sale, he would again repatriate their money to them

“The company obliged me with an open credit at a time when the average Nigerian had become a suspect in international business partnership. The lesson I learnt from this interface with the company is that trust is a cash which can be dispensed with the moment you exhaust its balance,” he said to the young school undergraduates gathered to listen to him speak.

“Sometime in 1993, a brother of mine who was a vice president of an international company met me and wanted me to be representing his company in Nigeria. His company was lifting crude oil from Nigeria. He wanted me to be an agent of the company in Nigeria and we agreed on my collecting 25 cents from every barrel of oil lifted in the country. I did it for a while before this venture ran into stormy waters due to the fraudulent disposition of some Nigerians involved. I lost so much foreign currency but got my determination level lifted.”

This loss however made the young Peter look inwards to the possibility of his being a major player in the oil industry. The transaction was a failure and even though what he lost was a lot, what he gained from the unfortunate encounter was an opportunity to understudy the oil industry and most importantly, a resolve to be at the top. He told the young undergraduates that the morale that lay in what he did was that integrity and hard-work are conjoined Siamese twins, intertwined and which go, one after the other.

The desire to inculcate these noble values in the upcoming generations inspired him to establish Focus International Schools, a primary and secondary school rolled into one, which he patterned to be world-class.

“I began to think of setting up my own oil company. Thereafter, I did a lot of shipping and oil and gas businesses, pursued an academic career and even sought to enter into the public service by vying for an elective office in Enugu State in 2003,” he said.

This was the turning point in Mbah’s life. He ran a campaign that was so unusually sophisticated that, even when he lost the election, the governor of Enugu State at the time, Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani, asked that he be brought to him, asking that he be made his Chief of Staff. He was later to become the state’s Commissioner of Finance and Economic Development. As a testament to the uncommon development he made in the state’s fiscal operations, through the strategy document he evolved which became the operating document for Enugu State government’s development programmes, the NewsWatch magazine’s special publication of July 3, 2006, described Mbah as “a man ahead of his time.”

After that career in the public service, Mbah came back to Lagos and rented a one-room office on the mainland at Ahmed Onibudo Street, with himself, secretary and office assistant as staff. This oil marketing company began to engage in buying and selling of oil products.

In his oil marketing business, Mbah told the students, “I recognised what customers wanted and gave a customer-centric approach to marketing, deployed a cost control measure, focusing on operational issues and how to cut costs. One thing led to the other and then we ventured into oil and gas. It was a combination of determination and a dogged spirit that took us to where we are today,” he said.

Mbah veered into the challenges he faced in the industry, stating that it was not all a bed of roses. The industry, he said, was a close-circuit one, with a lot of high regulations but that, the challenges of the industry notwithstanding, it allowed us some measure of expansionism through which his own company had grown phenomenally since inception.

“Here, you have to take license for every strand of your corporate aspiration; it literally frowns at innovation,” he said.

Mbah then veered into history. “The major harbinger of this high regulatory mechanism in the oil industry today is the 1975 Oputa panel of inquiry that resulted in the Petroleum Control Decree of 1975. This policy led to refineries construction and central control of product supply, price regulation etc. Since then, Nigeria has never been the same,” he said.

He then came back to the nature of operations at Pinnacle, stating that the company had today taken the oil and gas business to a notable height where it can only expand and not stand by watching others be the big players.

How did Peter shuttle to the top? He looked into void, to no one in particular, and said, matter-of-factly, that the journey had been through two paths. To become the CEO, the man who calls the shot at the zenith of a corporation, was a journey that can be undertaken in two ways: “One way is what I call the home track trajectory and the other, outside the loop trajectory,” he began.

“In the first, the CEO becomes the head by being a professional who rose through the ranks within the system to become the head of the corporation; in the second, the CEO gets to the top by being headhunted from the outside. Both have their advantages and the challenges that await them. I became the CEO of Pinnacle Oil and Gas by taking the first route. I am what you can call one who walked through the thorns-laden path into rising to the pinnacle of his career,” he said.In all these, both Pinnacle and Mbah are still projecting for the future. “At Pinnacle, we have come to realize that getting to the top is not the end itself. We must struggle to keep up with the strategies that have kept us afloat. Any corporation that refuses to grow would be swallowed up by those just growing or it may dissolve into nothingness. Our strategy for the future is to mull the idea of JVAs, mergers, take-overs and the sort in the same sector with companies with the same values where we can add to each other’s values and grow bigger therefrom. Ultimately, we put God at the cusp of our endeavours.”

Mbah’s parting words to the students was, “Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, these are the curves of the life trajectory of this young man standing before you.”

As the ancient saying goes that man proposes and God disposes, the great people of Enugu State, oblivious of the mergers, take-over and JVAs that Mbah projects for Pinnacle, are asking him to abandon all those lofty dreams, leave a company whose yearly turnover is greater than their state’s earnings in eight years, replicate the turn-around he made at Pinnacle in his home state and pilot their affairs the way he did at Pinnacle. Will Peter heed the call?