Under pressure, Kachikwu says NNPC reorganised not unbundled

The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu says that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was reorganized and not unbundled.

He stated that contrary to insinuations from some quarters, the reoganisation will not lead to termination of employments.

The minister’s latest comment is coming on the heels of workers’ protest to the move, as they shut down NNPC facilities across the country.

Asked whether government had already negotiated the unbundling of NNPC with the oil workers and members of the National Assembly, Kachikwu said the ministry was working in tandem with the lawmakers, noting that they had been very supportive.

The minister who spoke to reporters in Abuja on Wednesday, noted that the restructuring is targeted at getting the workers busy in order to earn their pay.

He added that the restructuring is to steer the corporation from administrative roles to business roles.
Kachikwu said: “So the principle of restructuring which is approved by Mr. President is that nobody loses work for now. The environment is just too thirsty for you to throw people out of the place. Nobody is losing work.

Read also: FG deploys security agents as Oil workers shut NNPC operations

“But people are going to get busy in respective business anywhere and it is point for those that want to prove a career to get skills and rise up and go and drive those companies. NNPC is still a whole it is not a different company. It is simply divisional break up.

“The whole idea is to focus everybody that it is no longer an administrative role. It is no longer a coordination role. It is a business focus role.”

He however explained that upon the realisation that the corporation was over-staffed, government resorted to creating jobs for idle workers to earn their pay.

“And why are we doing this because the analysis is that all the analysis done in terms of the number of staffing that we have, it shows that we are quite over-staffed.

“So, the only way you can do that is to create work so that anybody who is in the system (we don’t want anybody coming to read newspapers) have something they are doing and they are earning money.

“And as we are doing that we remembered suddenly that we have adequate staff to man and we are not really as over-staffed as we thought initially. This took some months of work to bring this out. Some of these ideas were the ideas that I created but consultants took them and worked the process.”

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