The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu on Thursday revealed that the Federal Government will next week carry out a major overhaul of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC. Kachikwu made the disclosure at the Shell Production and Exploration Oloibiri Lecture Series held in Abuja.
He said the Federal Government’s decision was in line with its aim of resolving the governance issues in the oil and gas sector as well as at the NNPC. He explained that the planned overhaul in the national oil firm had never happened at the corporation in the past 20 years. He said:
“We are starting first with simple governance issues, those that are not contentious, that are very rapid and that deals a lot with the transformation of the national oil company.
“For the national oil company, a lot of work is going on, I am sure some of you have seen the effects but 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.”