President Muhammdu Buhari’s appointment of Maikanti Kacalla Baru as the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) will have three implications- economic, political and staff’s mode in the NNPC.
The most important economic implication of Baru’s appointment is that the NNPC will continue to work without feeling a major tremor in the change of baton in the corporation; because Baru has worked closely with Kachikwu and has contributed to the reforms. Furthermore, Baru’s appointment will definitely impact the orientation within the NNPC staff. Those who are advocates of having a GMD from within the NNPC will be relieved; those who share the passion for more private-sector-like-reforms will be at home with Baru.
With the four autonomous business units and project management office, Baru is lucky – he has his job description clearly cut for him: to work within the tenets of President Buhari’s anti-corruption war – cleanup the oil and gas; sustain the current level of transparency that Nigerians have never seen – e.g publishing of NNPC monthly account; keep up and bring-out the benefits of Kachikwu’s painstaking reforms. Baru will also utilize his in-house experiences to put the right people and policies in the right position and time.
Nevertheless, Baru has some painstaking tasks ahead in the area of touching the life of every Nigerian – which is NNPC’s Unique Selling Point (USP). Notwithstanding if he achieves 100% success in other sectors of the NNPC business, if the sector that touches the lives of ordinary Nigerian is not effective; the entire nation will be on him. So the new GMD needs to pay special attention to sustaining the availability of petroleum products; drive more improvement and introduce corrective measures to some areas. Of recent, the PPMC under Ahmed Farouk has witnessed some heartwarming successes – some depots which have not received refined products for many years have recently received and loaded products, especially PMS. Kaduna depot is wonderfully wetting the north with PMS, AGO, DPK and some petro-chemicals.
Baru being very passionate about reforming the oil and gas sector, should tackle downstream major problems – incessant illegal tapping of pipelines by oil thieves, sabotage, right-of-way incursions, slow detection of leaks and in-line equipment failure due to inaccessible sites, including the old-fashioned method of managing the pipelines and increase the capacity of our refinery, by going for modular, mini and mobile refineries.
Zayyad I. Muhammad, [email protected]
