Daily Independent Online.
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Monday, July 26, 2004.
NNPC sets three-year transformation agenda
By Charles Okonji
Senior Business Correspondent, Lagos
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC)
has embarked on a transformation programme, which will enable it to achieve
improved levels of international competitiveness and sustainable profitability
through expanded participation in the oil and gas industry.
Group
Managing Director of NNPC, Mr. Funso Kupolokun, who outlined the
corporation’s agenda from this year to 2007 in an internal memo sent to
the workers, said for the upstream sector, the restructuring would grow
Nigeria’s reserves and production capacity to a significant level and
enable the country obtain an upward review of its Organisation of Petroleum
Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) quota.
Specifically, Kupolokun said the oil reserves and
producibility would increase from 33 billion to 40 billion barrels and three
million barrels per day to 4.5 million barrels per day respectively, ensuring
self-sufficiency in the supply of petroleum products, while aiming at
generating equal revenue from gas, as with oil, within the decade.
He said NNPC had got a mandate from the Federal
Government to monetise the country’s considerable gas assets optimally,
improve Nigeria’s capacity and transit the corporation from an oil
company to an integrated oil and gas company.
Kupolokun stated that for the corporation to achieve
the transformation agenda, NNPC must be re-engineered in terms of orientation,
administrative structure and ways of doing business, stressing that new people
would be injected fom outside the corporation into critical areas like finance
and accounts, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS) and
the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC).
Besides, the Nigerian Gas Company Limited (NGC) and
Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) would be broken into marketing
and pipeline outfits, with open access for all stakeholders.
Placing the mandate against the corporation’s
internal challenges and environment, Kulopokun disclosed that it had become
imperative for NNPC to fashion out immediate and comprehensive strategies that
would enable the corporation achieve the transformation. He explained that most
of NNPC’s business processes were still manual and archaic.
He said: “NNPC’s roles are not completely
clear and approval limits and controls are cumbersome and actually slow down
the pace of work. On the people’s dimension, I will like to see a
stronger performance in accountability. In addition, there has been a serious
deterioration in capability and capacity of our people and hence, their
productivity.
“When you put our internal situation against
the challenges and mandate enunciated above, you see the enormity and
complexity of the challenges we have to undertake and the imperative for this
to happen within a fairly aggressive time-frame. And also for these reasons, we
would need help to drive this change process,” he added.
NNPC, he said, had contracted two firms -
Accenture and Shell Global Solution - to work out the approach that would
help the corporation to deliver the transformational changes in the shortest
time possible and in the least disruptive manner.
