cool.. Nigeria To End Petrol Imports In 18 Months – Kachikwu

The minister of state for petroleum resources, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, has disclosed the federal government’s plans to end the importation of petrol within the next 18 months...


Disclosing this in Abuja at a press briefing yesterday while unveiling a strategic policy direction for the oil and gas sector, Kachikwu explained that government was targeting 12 to 18 months period to end petrol imports, working in collaboration with Joint Venture (JV) partners.

He said when this is achieved, the country will begin to look at exporting refined products and expanding retail business.

Kachikwu said: “We must target a time frame of between 12 and 18 months to try and get out of importation: it is not good for the country; it is not a good image; it does not create jobs; it causes losses of tax income to the government and creates a huge amount of emotional backlash when people have to queue for days looking for fuel.

“We are working with JV partners who can come into the refinery area; we have advertised recently for co-located refineries, asking for people to come and co-locate brand new refineries, coupled into our refinery premises and they can share pipelines and tankages.

“We are working hard to see if we can complete the refineries we are trying to do with JV partners within the next 12 to 18 months. For the co-located refineries which are the new ones, we are targeting to see that we are able to complete those over a period of two to three years. If we do that, we will have excess capacity of refined products and we’ll begin to look at export market.”

The minister, who also gave details of the NNPC unbundling, stated that the corporation had been unbundled into seven major divisions and 20 subset firms.

Kachikwu, who had last week announced that a major unbundling of the NNPC would be announced this week, said the final phase of restructuring of the NNPC had been approved by President Muhammadu Buhari, who is also the minister of petroleum resources.

He listed the seven new divisions to include the Upstream, Downstream, Refineries, Gas and Power, Ventures, Corporate Services and Finance and Accounts Divisions, all of which would have 20 subset companies.

The minister further listed the new chief executive officers (CEOs) of the new divisions to include Bello Rabiu (Upstream), Henry Ikem-Obih (Downstream), Anibor Kragha (Refineries), Saidu Mohammed (Gas and Power), Babatunde Adeniran, (Ventures), Isiaka Abdulrazaq (Finance and Accounts), and Isa Inuwa (Corporate Services.

According to him, under the new dispensation, the heads of the various divisions and companies will focus on business drive as against the previous arrangement where a group executive director simply coordinated meetings, gave policy direction and approvals without being held to specific deliverables or held responsible for the companies under him not being profitable.

“Whatever title we are giving them is to make them have a mind-set change that their jobs have now changed. It is to make sure that the entities under them are profitable and to sit in governance over their councils and to ensure that the policies they deploy create transparency and accountability,” he said.

Speaking further, the minister also disclosed that the ministry is working with the National Assembly on a new approach to unbundle the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) for quick passage of some segments. He stated that the first segment being concentrated on would deal with governance issues, which hopefully, should be passed before the end of the year.