HOW THE RENEWED HOPE UNDER PRESIDENT TINUBU TURNED NIGERIA TO AFRICA LARGEST GAS PRODUCER
BY DR LEEMON IKPEA, CON (CHAIRMAN LEEE ENGINEERING LTD)
Abbey
10/8/20263 min read
From a forty-foot box in Warri to compressors on the road to Lagos thereafter to LEE ENGINEERING GROUP AND ALLIED COMPANIES LTD.
How Dr Leemon Ikpea, CON narrated his success story to Nigerians and the world
In the Warri of his boyhood, the creeks did not promise a man much. Leemon Agbonjagwe Ikpea was born in Ewatto, in Esan South-East of Edo State, on 19 December 1956, but it was Warri that raised him. He went to St John’s Primary School at Ajamogha. In that Warri, neighbours did not first ask whether a boy was Itsekiri, Urhobo or Ijaw. They asked whether he could work.
He learned the oil industry the hard way, on refinery construction sites, and later said that work had been his university. At thirty-five he walked away from a paid job.
*On 11 November 1991 he registered Lee Engineering and Construction Company Limited*. The first office was a forty-foot container in Warri. Inside it were his brother, Engineer Tony Ikpea, a secretary, and two field hands. The dream written on that thin wall was plain: to become a top-class firm in engineering construction, energy and infrastructure.
The container did not stay a container. *Contracts came from Shell, Chevron and what was then NNPC*. Welding bays grew into workshops. *Workshops became a fabrication yard along the NPA expressway, later spoken of as about ten thousand square metres, with pressure-vessel lines, heat exchangers and process modules that Nigeria used to import. By the company’s thirtieth year, President Muhammadu Buhari and the Olu of Warri were among those who marked the journey. The Olu gave him the title Odolagbon of Warri Kingdom, a rare honour for a man not born Itsekiri. Nigeria gave him the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger. He remained Adolor of Ewatto.
Under the Renewed Hope years of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu GCFR*, the same yard has been asked to carry a heavier national load. Lee Engineering is building the Escravos–Lagos Pipeline System Phase III midline compressor stations at Ologbo and Okada in Edo State for NNPC Limited.
Federal officials who inspected the sites in 2026 described them as among the largest midline gas-compression facilities in Africa. When finished, the stations are meant to help the existing *ELPS move about 2.2 billion standard cubic feet of gas a day toward domestic power plants*, factories, and markets in West Africa, without laying a whole new transmission line.
PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU - NIGERIA FIRST POLICY
Components for the stations, the chairman has said, were made in his own factory, built to last thirty to forty years. Separately, the group’s project list includes the Assa North gas development in Imo State, a 300 million-standard-cubic-feet-a-day treatment facility. The gas story is not a single pipe from Ohaji to Lagos. It is a chain of Nigerian hands on Nigerian molecules.
In the yard the mood is the mood of people who have watched a container become a campus. *Public accounts of the workforce have moved over the years from roughly 1,300 to about 2,000, and later to about 3,500 Nigerians, not a verified figure above six thousand. What the record does show is a company that trained its own: engineers sent abroad, welders taught at home, foundational staff later made shareholders, among them Tony Ikpea, Joseph Ikpea, Becky Elijah, Godwin Abhulimen and Benjamin Ebalukhota.
By 2010 the firm had already spent years hiring and schooling Nigerians. The law then widened the road. NCDMB’s executive secretary, after touring the Warri yard in 2024, called the facilities impressive and spoke of jobs that Nigerian yards can do.
In April 2025 then Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, walked the same ground and tied it to the push for local manufacturing.
RENEWED HOPE HEALTH CARE FÓR STAFFS
Staff speak of the welfare in the language of a long service. Health cover, training slots, and the chance to rise inside an indigenous group are part of the company’s public story, even if no published nurse’s interview fixes every plan to a single federal scheme. What can be said without invention is that the Coordinating Minister of Health, Professor Muhammad Ali Pate, has made insurance expansion and primary care part of the Renewed Hope health agenda, and that a firm employing thousands of Nigerians sits inside that wider hope: a worker who falls ill should not fall out of the workforce.
Engineers on the fabrication floor talk less about speeches than about metal that no longer has to cross an ocean. Every vessel rolled in Warri is one less import, one less draw on scarce foreign exchange*. That is the practical face of the local-content boast, and of an administration that has urged indigenous fabricators to take work the yards can already perform.
Dr Ikpea still speaks of steel the way he once spoke of the container. Delta Steel and Ajaokuta remain national projects more often promised than finished. His hope, shared by many in the fabrication trade, is that a government willing to commission gas compressors and back indigenous yards will one day light those furnaces too, pull in patient capital, and give the naira something solid to stand on.
He has told visitors he is ready to make sacrifices because nobody else will build the country *Especially under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu Renewed Hope Reforms.
From a forty-foot box in Warri to compressors on the road to Lagos, the sacrifice already has an address
