SOME staff members of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) have insisted that an end to the lingering fuel scarcity may not be in view.
In separate chats with the Nigerian Tribune in Abuja, the staffers, who pleaded that their names be shielded from publication, said the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the corporation, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, did not have previous experience in mid to downstream sector of the petroleum industry.
“Incidentally, we have never had any challenge in upstream except in funding joint venture partnerships. Oil majors have always been in charge of upstream activities and they remit whatever is due to the NNPC,” one of them said.
They accused Kachikwu of learning on the job through “trial and errors.” One staffer pointed at the expertise of the GMD, is Government Relationship, Investment Policy and Corporate Governance, where he had concentrated in his previous employments at Texaco and ExxonMobil.
An angry staffer pointed at the alleged hasty way in which Kachikwu restructured the number of directories from eight to four on August 12, 2015 shortly after he assumed office only to increase it again to seven on March 8, this year.
“In the last several years, refining and distribution of imported products have been the major problems we have had in this country and so, President Muhammadu Buhari ought to have searched for an individual even from anywhere with particular experience in this areas instead of just appointing anybody”, another said.
“Since Kachikwu was appointed, NNPC has mainly been groping in the dark, trying one form of experimentation or the other including putting Nigeria to ridicule by inviting international bids for oil swaps and opening the bids on live television only to cancel the entire process few weeks after,” the staffer said.
The GMD was equally accused of not being a team worker by not conferring with the top echelon of the corporation before taking major decisions, which almost always boomerang.
“It appears that the man came to the job with a mindset that every staff of the NNPC are corrupt and incompetent. How can he succeed that way?”
“After all, it is interferences from top political hierarchy that has been the bane of NNPC and not that those of us who are here are either less competent or more corrupt than our counterparts in the private sector or even IOCs”, one of them declared.
Another point that one of them noted was the concentration of too much powers in Kachikwu as both operator, regulator and supervisor all at the same time.
“How can an individual supervise himself? Do you think that it is a good decision to make someone supervise himself? This is making the whole thing conflicting and the guy is not even able to concentrate. Many times, he is confused,” the staffer said.
Only on Wednesday, the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) asked Kachikwu to resign his appointment for failure to address the challenges facing the oil and gas industry and causing untold hardship on Nigerians.
Source: Nigerian Tribune
