The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has stated its readiness for the proposed reform plan of in-coming President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd).
This is in reaction to a recent report indicating that Buhari was going to start his ‘change agenda’ in the corporation, the Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, NNPC, Mr. Ohi Alegbe.
He said there was no pressure on the corporation at the moment, as everybody in the system had been busy doing their job.
“There is no pressure on us; no panic anywhere. There is no panic at the NNPC,” he said.
A recent report by Reuters had indicated that Buhari had picked the petroleum industry as his most urgent sector priorities.
Senator Bukola Saraki of the APC was quoted to have said, “We need to address the structural issues and leave the fiscal for now. A more transparent NNPC is needed with reasonable accounting.”
A top Ministry of Petroleum source, who would not want to be named, said instructions had been given to ministries, departments and agencies of government to tidy their books following the recent development at the federal level of government.
The source explained, “Everybody is tidying up their books so that those coming in will have the correct books to work with. The way instructions were given to all the MDAs is the same way NNPC was instructed.”
This development, he explained, was to ensure there was no vacuum in the system, as government was supposed to continue to run its affairs as a continuum.
The long-awaited Petroleum Industry Bill was meant to change everything from fiscal terms to overhauling the NNPC, environmental rules and revenue sharing, but its comprehensive nature caused disputes between lawmakers.
Uncertainties over the fiscal terms of the bill have been holding back billions of dollars of investment, especially into capital-intensive deepwater offshore, leading some to propose the bill be broken up into several pieces debated separately.
Four months after the Federal Government said it was going to intensify the search for oil in the Chad Basin in 2015, our correspondent learnt on Wednesday this week that nothing had yet to happen in that regard
In the face of dwindling oil reserves, the Federal Government, at the end of 2014, had said it would intensify the search for oil in the Chad Basin area.
It said the prevailing security challenges in the area would not deter it from the mission.
Nothing, however, has been said about the plan, and some stakeholders in the oil and gas industry have said Nigerians should not expect so much this year following the change of government at the federal level.
“In spite of the dire security situation in the Chad Basin area, the National Petroleum Investment Management Services, through our Frontier Exploration Services, continues to explore the frontier areas of Nigeria to increase oil and gas reserves,” the Group General Manager, NAPIMS, Mr. Jonathan Okehs, said in a post on the organisation’s website at the beginning of the year.
But a government source, who would not want to be named, told our correspondent that currently, there were more pressing issues to attend to than intensify the search for oil in Chad.
According to him, high level of uncertainty in the NNPC and the oil industry at large given the change of government at the federal level, was enough to distract the NNPC from such line of action.
The World Bank recently threw its weight behind the President-elect to probe the NNPC over allegations of missing funds.
The World Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa, Mr. Francisco Ferreira, said looking into financial records of the country, especially allegation of corruption at the NNPC, would check impunity and build public institutions in the future.
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