Gapuma Joins Africa’s Downstream Leaders as OTL Marks Twenty Years in Lagos

2 November 2026

A team from Gapuma’s Lagos office, home to group company GLB Chemical Services, attended OTL Africa Downstream Energy Week 2026, one of the most important gatherings in the calendar of Africa’s downstream oil and gas sector. The team was Prakash Ramchandani, Managing Director of GLB Chemical Services, with Thompson Longe and Akash Suhanda. This year’s edition carried particular weight: it marked the event’s 20th anniversary, with the conference and trade exhibition running from 26 to 29 October at the Lagos Oriental Hotel under the theme “Secure Energy, Shared Prosperity”.

Organised by OTL Africa Downstream, the week drew participants from every link in the energy value chain – oil marketers, refiners, traders, regulators, logistics companies, equipment suppliers and service providers. The agenda reflected the pressures and possibilities facing the industry: how to make supply secure and affordable, how to attract the investment that infrastructure demands, and how to ensure that the gains of reform are felt by businesses and households alike.

The tone was set on the opening day by Rabiu Umar, Chief Executive of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA). “Secure energy is energy we produce, we move, we store and price well for ourselves,” he told delegates, as the regulator unveiled a revised Nigerian Gas Transportation Network Code designed to broaden access to the pipeline network – including for power and fertiliser plants – and bring greater transparency to the way gas is moved and traded.

It was a fitting definition for an anniversary edition. For much of OTL’s history, Nigeria’s downstream story was one of dependence on imported refined products. Today, the questions are more searching: how Africa can turn its resources and its growing refining capacity into dependable supply, and how regulators, investors and operators can build a market that rewards long-term commitment rather than short-term advantage. Otunba Adetunji Oyebanji, Chairman of the OTL Africa Downstream Advisory Board, put it plainly in the run-up to the event, observing that “the long term is more important than the short-term game because of political expedience”.

For Gapuma, the week offered a valuable vantage point on a market in which it has deep and growing roots. As an international trader in commodities and speciality chemicals, the Group supplies many of the inputs on which the downstream industry quietly depends – the chemicals and additives that keep refiners, blenders and lubricant manufacturers running. In Nigeria, that work is led from Lagos through GLB Chemical Services. Across West Africa, the Group’s presence spans Nigeria, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and its appointment earlier this year as Clariant’s distributor of Well Service Additives across all three countries has drawn it still closer to the region’s energy sector.

Events such as OTL matter precisely because the downstream business is built on relationships as much as on molecules. Refiners need reliable feedstock and access to market; marketers and distributors need predictable rules and efficient logistics; and suppliers need to understand where demand is heading before it arrives. Four days under one roof in Lagos – among the regulators who write the rules, the companies that move the product and the service providers that support them – is an efficient way to take the measure of all three.

For the Lagos team, the week was a chance to renew existing relationships, open new ones across the value chain and come away with a sharper picture of where Nigeria’s downstream market – and the wider West African market it increasingly supplies – is heading. It is a market GLB knows from the inside, and one in which it intends to keep growing.

As OTL Africa Downstream enters its third decade, its chosen theme is a useful reminder of what is at stake. Energy security is not an abstraction; it is measured at the pump, on the factory floor and in the household budget. Shared prosperity depends on getting it right. Gapuma intends to remain part of that conversation – and part of the supply chain that makes it possible.