Hu Jintao arrived in Abuja on the afternoon of 26 April 2006 as the third leg of a seven-country Africa tour timed to the opening of the third Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit. He was received by Olusegun Obasanjo at the Presidential Villa with full state honours and addressed a joint session of the Nigerian National Assembly on 27 April — only the second foreign head of state ever to do so after Bill Clinton in 2000.
The substantive deliverables were unprecedented in scale. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) was awarded production-sharing licences over four offshore blocks (OPL 229, 471, 432 and 477) for a total consideration of approximately US$4 billion; the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China extended a US$2.5 billion credit line for railway modernisation (the Lagos–Kano standard-gauge project that would be inaugurated in stages from 2014 onwards); and Sinopec was awarded a refinery-rehabilitation MOU for the Kaduna refinery. The visit also produced the 'Strategic Partnership' framework that would govern Sino-Nigerian relations for the following twenty years and would define the trajectory of Chinese commercial penetration of West Africa.