The Federal government of Nigeia has approved the unbundling of one of Nigeria’s biggest corporations.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has historically been mired in secrecy and has proved itself immune to transparency.
However, the leadership of Dr. Ibe Kachikwu has tried to address these issues by changing the operational structure of the corporation.
Dr. Kachikwu announced yesterday that the NNPC had been unbundled into seven new divisions. Five of the core divisions are Upstream, Downstream, Refining Group, Midstream, and Finance. The other two are the Finance and Services Groups.
Kachikwu said at a press briefing yesterday: “The president has approved the final phase of the restructuring of the NNPC, under that phase it is not so much different from what we have now but we have restructured ourselves into four key business components: the upstream, which is what you used to call the Exploration and Production (E&P), the downstream, which is what you called the Commercial and Investment (C&I), the gas power market, which is basically a pullout from the E&P, the refinery group, which is basically the three refineries, and of course the ventures, which is every other small company here and there that did not have a sense of direction.
“Underneath these companies, we have a collective of 20 companies on the whole, where we had about 16 before, so only about four are new introductions. So it is not so much the size and we have not split NNPC into 30 companies, but there are four major divisional groups.
“Four or five are business focused, while others provide services. Beneath these five that are business-geared are the companies that are there. For example, with PPMC, we have taken the pipeline and depots unit and put them into a different company so that somebody focuses on that, while PPMC deals with the marketing of products.”