Nigeria's Decision Makers - The NNPC Structure.

NNPC was formed in 1977 from a merger of the state-owned Nigerian National Oil Corp. and a former version of the ministry of petroleum resources. NNPC's superstructure consists of a group managing director and six group executive directors. The latter are in charge of six directorates which oversee NNPC's subsidiaries, as follows:

The E&P Directorate. Its units include upstream departments, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (Napims) which oversees the oil producing JVs, a group which monitors the PSAs, NPDC, Integrated Data Services which provides seismic and reservoir evaluation services, and Nigerian Gas Co. (NGC) which supplies the local market with gas and handles the national gas pipelines.

The Processing Directorate. Its four subsidiaries are the Kaduna Refining & Petrochemicals Co., the Warri Refining & Petrochemicals Co., the Eleme Petrochemicals Co., and the Port Harcourt Refining Co.

The Engineering & Technical Directorate. Its subsidiary is Nigerian Engineering & Technical Co., which was once a JV with Bechtel. But the US engineering company has withdrawn from this venture.

The Commercial & Investment Directorate. This is in charge of the PPMC, which markets and distributes oil products in Nigeria, and Hyson Nigeria which is a JV with Dutch trader Vitol marketing oil products in West Africa.

Finance & Accounts. With the help of the World Bank, this now issues externally audited accounts.

The Corporate Services Directorate.

Slated for privatisation in the first phase, a 2000 target date put off to late 2005 and then to 2008, are the processing directorate's units, NPDC and NGC. Shell has been said to be interested in acquiring NGC and has appointed a bank to advise it on this matter.

A restructuring of NNPC had begun in late 1998 by a special committee. But successive NNPC heads have since adopted different approaches with the help of experts working under the supervision of the Presidential Office in Abuja (see background in Vol. 57, No. 8).

NNPC's board of directors is chaired by the full Minister of Energy, President Umaru Yar'Adua, who appoints the group's managing director and the other board members.

Tony Chukwueke, head of the powerful Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), is a key decision maker for the petroleum sector. An engineer, Chukwueke took up this position in 2005 to replace Macauley Ofurhie, who clashed with some of his superiors over that year's E&P licencing round. Previously Chukwueke used to be a key technical adviser to the Ministry of Petroleum Resources.

Apart from regulating the petroleum sector and overseeing the country's upstream licencing rounds, the DPR monitors the country's E&P, exports and downstream operations. In late 2004 managers at the DPR, including monitors responsible for clearing crude oil exports from the country's eight terminals and oil products imports, went on strike in protest against their management's failure to implement agreements. But the trade was not affected as remaining management staff took charge of the terminals. The dispute was settled in early 2005.