By Mide Alabi
A few months ago, a journalist reached out to me following my piece on gas flaring in TheCable. An American, based in Washington, working on a broader story about energy accountability in West Africa. He had read the article and wanted something specific: field-level compliance data. Not confidential contracts or proprietary models. Just operational facts. Which operators were flaring gas under active permits? Which fields were meeting utilisation targets? What enforcement actions had the regulator taken, and against whom?
I assumed this would be accessible somewhere. A regulator’s portal, a consolidated report, even a delayed dataset. I looked.
What I found instead was fragments. Aggregate numbers in one place, a press release in another, an annual report somewhere else. Enough to confirm that the data existed. Not enough to construct a coherent picture. The problem, I eventually realised, was not access in the usual sense. It was structure. The data was there; technically, it just could not be used.
I thought about this for a while and decided it was worth writing about.
THE CONCEPT: DATA FLARING
Gas flaring, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the combustion of natural gas that is produced as a by-product of oil extraction but cannot be captured, stored, or sold. It represents the waste of a valuable resource due to infrastructure and incentive failures. Nigeria has been one of the world’s worst offenders for decades, burning gas worth billions of dollars annually simply because the systems to use it have not been built or prioritised.
I have written extensively in the past about gas flaring and now, I want to introduce a parallel concept: data flaring.
Just as gas flaring represents the waste of a valuable natural resource, data flaring represents the waste of a valuable informational resource for precisely the same underlying reasons. Infrastructure failure and incentive design failure.
Nigeria generates enormous volumes of data continuously. Regulators collect compliance reports, companies submit statutory filings, agencies track performance metrics, and ministries record transactions. The Petroleum Industry Act alone introduced a range of new mandatory reporting obligations for upstream operators and so did the Electricity Act, which created performance disclosure requirements for distribution companies. The Nigeria Tax Administration Act also mandates filings across the formal economy. On paper, this should be a data-rich environment.
In practice however, that data is siloed across agencies, inconsistently formatted, rarely interoperable, and often not publicly accessible in structured form; so although it exists, it cannot be searched, compared, queried or otherwise used. It cannot support investment decisions, regulatory accountability, or policy calibration and as such, it is, functionally, flared.
NOT MERELY A MORAL SITUATION
I want to be deliberate about the framing here, because it matters.
The usual argument for open government data is a moral one: openness is virtuous, secrecy is suspicious, and publishing data is what accountable governments do. As much as I don’t think that argument is wrong, it is not the argument that I am making here.
My argument stems more from an economic perspective. Data is infrastructure, and like every other form of infrastructure, it has a return on investment and a cost of neglect.
If data is not standardised, connected, query-able, and time-consistent, it cannot support investment decisions, because investors cannot price what they cannot measure, it cannot support regulatory accountability, because enforcement actions that are invisible cannot generate deterrence, and it cannot support policy calibration, because policymakers operating on delayed or partial signals make decisions that are systematically out of phase with the reality they are trying to manage.
What we are dealing with in Nigeria is not as much a secrecy problem as it is a design problem. And design problems require design solutions, not just political goodwill.
WHAT DATA FLARING ACTUALLY COSTS
The numbers, where they exist, are uncomfortable.
In 2024, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative released its 2022–2023 emissions disclosure report. The findings were stark: only 15 out of 62 oil companies submitted their emissions data, a compliance rate of 24%. Notably absent were Aiteo, Seplat, Eni, and Oando — not fringe operators mind you, but major industry players. The data that was submitted was also incomplete: most companies did not disclose scope 3 emissions, and the majority of Nigeria’s “super-emitters”: the 19 largest flaring sites, which account for 64% of all gas flared, either did not report or omitted field-level details entirely.
Here is what makes that figure particularly damaging. The same companies that failed to report to NEITI are, in several cases, members of the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership, an international initiative that explicitly demands transparency on methane emissions. Satellite data from the Nigerian Gas Flare Tracker shows what those companies are actually emitting. The mismatch between what satellites record and what companies report is far from a minor discrepancy, it’s a structural indictment of a system that generates compliance obligations without generating compliance visibility.
The NUPRC, to its credit, reports a 97% rate of physical metering installation among upstream operators. That sounds encouraging, but physical metering and public data accessibility is not the same thing. A meter that reports to a regulator who does not publish the data is not meaningfully different, for the investor or the citizen, from no meter at all. The infrastructure of measurement exists, but visibility infrastructure is sorely lacking.
In terms of the economic consequences of this gap, investors pricing risk in an opaque environment apply a discount to the assets they cannot evaluate. That discount is a real cost, borne by Nigeria in the form of higher capital costs, delayed investment decisions, and a persistent perception of regulatory unreliability. A Springer Nature study published in 2025 estimated Nigeria’s direct revenue losses from gas flaring between 2002 and 2024 at $56.75 billion, with the broader economic opportunity cost rising to $120.15 billion when forgone LNG exports are factored in. That figure exists precisely because data failures and infrastructure failures are two sides of the same governance coin. You cannot fix one without addressing the other.
The electricity sector tells a similar story. Performance metrics for distribution companies exist within the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission’s framework, but they are not publicly track-able in real time, they are not in a format that allows cross-operator comparison, and they are not integrated with the procurement and spending data that would allow anyone to evaluate whether regulatory penalties are being collected and applied. Each agency holds a piece of the picture, but no one holds the whole thing.
This is the pattern. It’s not a failure of just one sector in particular. A system’s failing.
FRAGMENTATION IS THE DIAGNOSIS
Nigeria’s regulatory data problem is not primarily about secrecy or bad faith. Most regulators are collecting what they are required to collect. NUPRC has metering guidelines, NEITI has disclosure frameworks, and NERC has performance reporting requirements. The Federal Inland Revenue Service processes millions of filings annually as well as The Bureau of Public Procurement which maintains records of government contracts.
The problem is that none of these systems talk to each other.
Data sits across agencies in different formats, on different timelines, governed by different legal frameworks, with no common architecture binding them together. Even when data is technically “public” by virtue of being published in an annual report, buried in a PDF on a government website, available upon request, it is not searchable, not comparable across time or operators, and not decision-useful. It satisfies the letter of disclosure without serving its purpose.
The result is a country that is simultaneously data-rich and information-poor. Nigeria produces more regulatory data than most people realise. It just flares most of it.
WHAT A DATA INFRASTRUCTURE FRAMEWORK LOOKS LIKE
The intervention I am proposing is not primarily legislative, though legislation will be part of it. It is architectural.
Nigeria needs a National Data Infrastructure Framework — a coordinated set of standards, mandates, and systems that ensure regulatory data is not just collected but structured, connected, and visible. For maximum efficiency, this framework should rest on five pillars.
First, standardised reporting formats across regulators. Every agency that collects compliance data should be required to collect it in a format that is machine-readable, time-stamped, and compatible with a common schema. While this is not technically complicated, is administratively and politically difficult, which is why it has not happened. A directive from the Presidency, backed by the existing authority of the Nigeria Data Protection Commission and the Ministry of Finance, would be sufficient legal foundation.
Second, interoperability between agencies. The NUPRC, NEITI, NERC, FIRS, and the Bureau of Public Procurement should be able to exchange and cross-reference their datasets. An example of what this looks like in practice: an investor querying a company’s compliance history should be able to pull its gas flaring record, its tax filings, and its contract award history from a single interface. That kind of cross-referencing currently requires months of manual effort, if it is possible at all.
Third, public-facing dashboards and APIs. A minimum viable version of this already exists in the form of the NUPRC’s online portal and NEITI’s published reports. What is needed is not a new institution but a mandate that these portals publish structured, downloadable data in real time; not as PDFs, but as query-able datasets. The NUPRC Flare Dashboard I proposed in one of my earlier articles is one example. A live NERC distribution company performance tracker is another.
Fourth, legal mandates defining what must be disclosed, in what format, and on what timeline. Voluntary disclosure is insufficient, as the 24% NEITI compliance rate demonstrates. The legal architecture, like the PIA, the Electricity Act, the Nigeria Tax Administration Act, already contains disclosure obligations. What is missing is the downstream technical specification that makes those obligations actionable. Secondary legislation and regulatory guidelines can fill this gap without resorting to the creation of new primary legislation.
Fifth, independent verification. The gap between what companies self-report and what satellite data records in Nigeria’s flaring sector demonstrates that a reporting system without verification is a reporting system without credibility. Third-party audits, satellite cross-referencing, and civil society access to raw data are not luxuries. They are the mechanism through which reported data becomes trusted data.
CLARIFYING POSITIONS
I am not arguing for the disclosure of sensitive commercial data or proprietary operational information. There is a defensible distinction between data that serves legitimate business confidentiality and data that serves regulatory accountability and the framework I am proposing sits firmly on the right side of that line.
I am not assuming bad faith by regulators. Most of the fragmentation described in this piece is the product of institutional inertia and resource constraints, not deliberate obstruction. The NUPRC and NEITI have both made genuine progress on data governance in recent years. The argument is not that they are failing, it is that the architecture within which they operate is not yet fit for the economy it is supposed to govern.
Also important to note, I am not suggesting that data alone fixes governance. A transparent flaring record does not automatically stop a company from flaring, as a published tax compliance dashboard also does not automatically improve collection, but without structured, visible data, even well-designed regulation becomes impossible to verify, difficult to trust, and hard to scale. Good data is a precondition for governance that works.
A FINAL WORD
Nigeria has spent the better part of the last decade building the legal and institutional architecture of a modern regulatory state, particularly with the enactment of solid and well received landmark legislation. They create real obligations, real institutions, and real enforcement powers.
What has not kept pace is the informational architecture that makes those instruments visible. We have built the rules. We have not yet built the systems that allow anyone to see whether the rules are being followed.
The person who reached out to me never got the data he needed. I suppose he had to write his story without it, which means the story was less precise than it could have been. The investors he spoke to had one more reason to price uncertainty into their models.
We have the rules, we have the institutions, and we have built the reporting obligations.
What we don’t have, is a system that allows them to be seen, and a system that cannot see itself cannot correct itself.
Mide Alabi is a lawyer and writer. He writes on energy regulation, data governance, and African economic policy. He is co-founder of Trellis Africa, a compliance infrastructure firm for Nigerian startups.
