Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, the new General Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said that the corporation is set to carry out another round of forensic audits that will run into 2015 accounts, to ascertain its true financial state.
He told reporters at the Presidential Villa in Abuja after a closed door meeting with the President that more staff of the NNPC may be laid-off in due course, as the right personnel must be in key positions. “At the end of the day, NNPC isn’t a public service, it is a corporation and it is going to be run like a company, generating money and profit for Nigerians. So that whole concept of anything goes is going to stop and this is the first stage in that whole process.
“It is a three-pronged process that I am following, there is a people aspect which we are dealing with now, there is a process after the people at the right places. We are going to get a forensic audit done so that we know clearly, not the one PW did, but the proper forensic audit that will cover us all the way to 2014,2015, and we will be able to say to you this is the state of the economy” he said.
On the restructuring and re-positioning of the corporation, he said: “It’s A-to-Z restructuring. I have done the first three layers beginning with Group Executive Directors (GEDs) to Group General Managers (GGMs) and General Managers (GMs) who will take it to the lower layer.
Kachikwu said many things that have been done wrongly before will now be corrected, as a new a culture for accountability and service delivery is being set up. He said the whole idea is to go back to being able to look at the appraisals of staff, “how well you have done on the job that you have done, and if you have done very well, how do we elevate you to positions where you can offer more service? If you have not done well enough and we can retrain you, we will, but if you have not done well enough and there is no possibility of retraining, we let you go”.
Processes and control measures will be put in place for retraining and re-positioning of staff. Afterwards, the corporation will commence working with majors and minors in the oil sector to take the country forward. The final stage, will be the business stage, which will entail looking at all the existing contracts, to ascertain if they are good or if they need to be redone. Challenges arising from the reducing balance sheet as a result of the drop in oil prices, will also be looked at, with the aim of seeking out ways to energize recovery and income growth, so that the government will have money to work with.
“It is a very intensive and calibrated work, but over the next five, six moths you will begin to see a new emergence in the 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. “I think that the new NNPC that you are going to see going forward, will be a different institution all together” he said.
On the Presidential directive for the corporation to remit all funds to the Treasury Single Account (TSA), Kachikwu said the issue was still being looked at, as the running of the corporation required a lot of funds.
“All that is being looked at, because to run an oil company you need a lot of funds to do it, if you don’t ,you will close down the corporation and the production system will close down. So we are looking at having merged the need for accountability and openness with the need to make sure that the industry also survives, you cannot throw away the baby with the bath water” he added .
