NNPC to sack more staff, set for fresh audit

The head of Nigeria’s state-owned oil company, NNPC, has stated that the corporation would sack more staff as part of its re-organisation.

Emmanuel Kachikwu, who was recently appointed Group Managing Director of the corporation by President Muhammadu Buhari stated this on Thursday while addressing reporters at the presidential villa. Over 35 senior management staff of the corporation have been sacked or compulsorily retired in the last one week.

Mr. Kachikwu said as part of the NNPC’s three-pronged approach towards restructuring, more staff of the corporation may be sacked to bring about efficiency and check redundancy. He said the reforms involve downsizing of the workforce and reworking of the business strategy.

He also said the corporation is set to carry out another round of forensic audit that will run into 2015 accounts to ascertain the firm’s true financial state.

Mr. Kachikwu said a lot of things that have been done wrongly before will be corrected, and that the corporation is setting a new culture for accountability and service delivery.

He said NNPC will now appraise staff performance and make appropriate decisions after assessment.

“How well you have done on the job that you have done, and if you have done very well, how do we elevate you to positions where you can offer more service,” he said. “If you have not done well enough and we can retrain you, we will. But if you have not done well enough and there is no possibility of retraining, we let you go.”

The GMD said processes and control measures will be put in place for retraining and repositioning of staff, adding that the corporation will commence working with oil majors and minors in the sector to maximise professionalism.

“NNPC isn’t a public service, it is a corporation and it is going to be run like a company, generating money and profit for Nigerians. So that whole concept of anything goes is going to stop and this is the first stage in that whole process.

“It is a three-pronged process that I am following. There is a people aspect, which we are dealing with now. There is a process of putting the people at the right places. We are going to get a forensic audit done so that we know clearly [what is going on], not the one PW [PriceWaterouseCoopers] did but a proper forensic audit that will cover us all the way to 2014, 2015, and we will be able to say to you this is the state of the economy,” he said.

He said the business stage entails looking at all the existing contracts to determine their propriety or otherwise, noting that challenges arising from reducing balance sheet as a result of the drop in international oil price will also be looked at in order to design ways of recovery and income growth.

“It is a very intensive and calibrated work, but over the next five, six months you will begin to see a new emergence in the NNPC, a new process of oil administration in the country and obviously giving boost to Mr President’s dream of taking the oil industry back to where it should be,” Mr. Kachikwu said.