Nigeria’s Federal Government has unbundled its state oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation into seven divisions comprising 20 subsidiaries, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and Group Managing Director of the corporation, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, has said.
Kachikwu, who spoke to journalists in Abuja on Tuesday, also stated that the subsidy regime on petrol and kerosene had not been terminated by the Federal Government. He, however, noted that what the government had done was to modulate the prices of the commodities based on the fall in crude oil prices internationally.
The minister, who spoke in details on plans and actions undertaken by the government, both in the oil sector and at the national oil firm, 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.
“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 added, “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.
