NNPC broken into 30

Dr. Ibe Kachikwu

NIgeria's Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, has disclosed that the nation's lead petroleum coy, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has been  broken into five major operational zones with about 30 independent companies with their chief executive officers given measurable targets to achieve.

He further stated that the Federal Government will announce the final outcome of this planned major overhaul of the entire structures of the state oil company next week.

The Minister made this disclosure yesterday in Abuja while speaking at the 25th Annual Oloibiri Lecture Series and Energy Forum (OLEF) of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Nigerian Council, and added that the structural overhaul would see the new companies competing for business opportunities across the global oil and gas industry with sustainable profits expected from them.

According to him, the NNPC would be broken into the upstream, downstream, midstream, and refining while every other company that is trending would be merged into the venture group.

He said, “Within the next one week, we are going to be announcing some really major overhaul of the system, one that hasn’t been done in over 20 years. The effect of that would be to quite frankly unbundle the huge company into four to five main operational zones: the upstream, downstream, midstream, refining, and of course every other company that is trending to the venture group.

“But what is more important is that at the same time we are also unbundling the subsets of these companies to about 30 independent companies with their own managing directors and so titles like the group executive directors which you have been used to in the last 30 years will disappear and in place of that, you are going to have chief executive officers.”

According to Kachikwu, chief executive officers who would be appointed to head the new companies would have to take responsibilities for the titles they would be assigned because “at the end of the day, a CEO of an upstream company must deliver upstream results and we are very focused on that.”