Minister says NNPC now broken into 7 divisions

Kachikwu said “The President has approved the final phase of restructuring of the NNPC. Under that phase, we have five business-focused divisions – the upstream, which you used to call E&P (exploration and production); the downstream; the gas power marketing, which is a pull-out from the E&P; the refineries group, which is basically for all the three refineries; and then of course the ventures for every other little company that is here and there, thrown all over the place that doesn’t seem to have a sense of direction.”

The minister also said “So, the ventures will to act like the incubation centre where you nurture these companies through management, get them very efficient and then decide whether you want to spin them off to be on their own independently, or whether you want to throw them to the stock exchange. So, when I hear unbundling into 30 companies, that is not correct.”

He said “If you look at the companies that will come underneath these divisions, we have a total of 20 firms on the whole. We had about 15 before, so only about four or five are new introductions. These subsidiaries are already there, we only added a few. Among those earlier divisions that I’ve given you, we also have finance and services, and that brings it to seven divisions. But five are business-focused, while the others provide services.

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“Why are we doing this? It is because quite frankly, the NNPC is very over-staffed. So, we have to create work in order to ensure that everybody who is in the system will be busy and earn money. And as we began to do that, we realised suddenly that we had adequate staff and we are not really as over-staffed as we thought initially. So, the principle of our restructuring, which was approved by the President, is that nobody losses their work,” Kachikwu said.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has also reopened the Port Harcourt refinery, six weeks after it was shut down due to crude oil supply challenges caused by pipeline attacks.

The seven new units are: Upstream, Downstream, Gas & Power, Refineries, Ventures, Corporate Planning & Services and Finance and Accounts.