Ibe Kachikwu, the minister of state for petroleum resources, said President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the restructuring phase of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) into four autonomous profit-oriented companies.
The four companies will be the upstream company, the downstream company, midstream company which is the gas and power company and the refining group holding company, This Day reports.
He this known on Thursday, December 17, at a town hall meeting with journalists and civil society organisations in Abuja.
According to him, they would all operate independently with quasi-managing directors and remit profits and taxes to the coffers of the government.
He said there would still be other managing directors at the corporate level.
Kachikwu said: “A lot of the non-performing but asset-based subsidiaries that we have, we will put them into a venture company where we will begin to help manage them to profitability and hopefully either spin them off ultimately or make them so profitable that we may decide to keep them.
“This is the sort of financial model that we are going to be dealing with over the next few months and trying to set up a performance index that is comparable with the very best in the world.”
The minister added that his focus in the coming year would be cutting production cost; growing crude oil production to 2.4 million barrels per day (mbpd); cutting government’s subsidy on domestic supply of petrol through market-based methods; helping the country exit the onerous cash call regime in joint venture operations; reducing the industry’s contracting cycle to six months; and reengineering a profitable operational model for the country’s four refineries.
Recall that a week ago, report had surfaced that the federal government is proposing to split the NNPC into two companies, the Nigeria Petroleum Assets Management Company (NPAM) and a National Oil Company (NOC) that would be run on commercial lines and partly privatised.
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