Kachikwu

Ayorinde Oluokun.

The gale of sacks of staff in state owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) where at least, 38 senior managers have been sacked in the last one week is not yet over, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, the Group Managing Director of the Corporation, told reporters. Kachikwu was appointed as the GMD of NNPC by President Muhammadu Buhari last week.Since his appointment, the new NNPC GMD have carried out a gale of sacks, deployments of staff as well as restructure of the Corporation which he said were designed to cut down costs.

Kachikwu however told journalists after a meeting with President Buhari that the purge of workers which he described as part of the initiatives aimed at restructuring the company for better performance and accountability will continue. He also disclosed that another round of forensic audits will be carried out which will cover the 2014-2015 accounts in order to ascertain the corporation’s true financial position.

The NNPC GMD said the purge will be done after an the audit of staff which he described as part of a three-pronged approach which includes pruning the work force and reworking the business strategy in the ongoing repositioning of the nation’s oil corporation.

According to him, the ongoing reforms and restructuring will in the next six months give birth to a new NNPC, in which the era of anything goes would have become a thing of the past. “Things have been done wrongly and things need to be done differently. We are doing a lot of work in terms of repositioning, restructuring, getting the right personnel in key places and setting a culture of accountability and service delivery so that the new NNPC that you are going to see will be a different institution altogether,” Kachikwu who said the restructuring will be a complete exercise said.

He added: “The restructuring will be complete. It is A to Z. I have done the first three layers which are going to the GEDs to GGMs and General Managers. You are going to have a lot more now. The GEDs and GGMs will take it to the next layer which is the lower layer. The whole idea is to go back to being able to look at your appraisals; how well have you done in the job? If you have done very well, how do we elevate you to a position where you can offer more service? If you have not done well enough, we can retrain you and if you have not done well enough and there is no possibility of retraining you, we will let you go. At the end of the day, NNPC is not a public service. It is a corporation and will run like a company generating money for the people of Nigeria. And so, that whole concept of ‘anything goes’ should stop. And this is the first stage of that whole process.”

Kachikwu said there are the people and the process aspect to the reforms. In his words: “We are going to put processes and controls in place. We are going to do retraining and repositioning and then, we are going to re-engage our majors and minors, all those who are active in the sector, for us to work as a team to try to take Nigeria forward. It is going to be the process stage. The final stage will be the business stage which is now looking at all the existing contracts; are they good, are they ok, do they need to be re-kitted and redone? We will look at the PSCs, what do we do going forward? We will look at the challenges posed by very reduced balance sheet as a result of $40 or $50 per barrel oil, what do we do to energise recovery and income growth so that government will have money to work with?”

He revealed that it is a very intensive work, very calibrated work, adding that a lot of us “are not spending time sleeping but over the next five to six months, you will begin to see emerging a new NNPC, a new process of oil administration in the country and obviously giving fillip to Mr. President’s dream of taking the oil industry back to where it should be,” he added.

Kachikwu also said NNPC is considering how to implement the President’s directive on the Treasury Single Account in a way that it will not affect the operations of the oil company.