‘The Nigeria Literature Prize will outlast any MD of NLNG’ – Tony Attah

By Toyin Akinosho
Tony Attah, 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”.
The Nigeria Prize for Literature is the richest prize in African literature, worth One Hundred Thousand American Dollars ($100,000). It was founded in 2004 to honour literary erudition by Nigerian authors. The 17th annual prize is currently being contested. Its winner 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 in 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 and half billion standard cubic feet of natural gas, mined from reservoirs in the Niger Delta basin, into liquid form through refrigeration. It transports these “large bottles” of liquids on sea going vessels to markets in Europe and Asia.
The Nigeria Prize for Literature, NPL, 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 was for Prose Fiction. “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, with a three-year contract to lead NLNG Ltd. In 2019, he delivered on the most crucial item on his to do list; he led the company to a Final Investment Decision on the company’s seventh LNG Plant (Train).
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 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 16 years and the 17th one is coming up in October h so you have to make it a point to be there.
“I really will like to take this opportunity to accentuate the science prize because it is important to us. Two 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. Last year we pursued innovations in electric power generation. Nigeria is full of innovators that are undiscovered. Look at the story of the girl from Anambra who went to Yale (an Ivy League University in the US) but have not seen a computer before and someone sponsored her. 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 developments in science and literature with these little prizes and I think your media organization should connect more with the science prize as well”.

bookartville.com