Speaking to journalists when he led members of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari, Kachukwu said he had no magical wand to change the situation of things overnight.
“One of the training I did not receive is that of a magician but I am working very hard to ensure some of these problems we are facing go away. And let’s be honest, for the five or six months we have been here, NNPC has moved from a 50 per cent importer of products to basically a 100 per cent importer. And the 445 barrels that were allocated was to cover between 50 and 55 percent importation.
“So its quite frankly shear magic that we even have the amount of products at the stations. We are looking to see how to get foreign exchange input. We are going to put up a new model to enable us increase the pace and actually get majors as part of the crew of those to bring in more products so that the NNPC will sort of go back to the capacity of what it use to do and the majors will take over the balance of importation.
Our strategy is that whatever is produced in the refineries will not go for sale, we are going to keep them in strategic reserve. Because the key problem here is that there is no reserve anytime there is a
gap in supply it goes off.
push up the reserves in the nation.
The meeting with the President is coming weeks after oil workers in an industrial action shut down the operations of the NNPC for fear of job loss following an announced restructuring of the corporation.
Kachukwu said this was the first time the unions were meeting with the President to review some of the concerns in the oil industry to find solutions.
Some of the concerns he said, included the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), fuel scarcity issue as well as the refineries for which “we are thankful we didn’t sell”. The unions he said are also worried about the utilization of depots as well as all kinds of logistic issues that plague the oil industry. “They are worried about job loss in the sector arising from the position of majors who feel that the economy is giving the rough end of the sticks and then try to whittle down staff. And so we are going to be working with the oil majors to ensure that we do not experience the kind of job loss that we are hearing has the potential to occur in the sector” he added.
The National Presidents of the NUPENG and PENGASSAN, Igwe Achese and Olabode Johnson, both told journalists that President Buhari assured the unions that they will continue to be part of the ongoing restructuring.
