Abel Ejikeme
Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum, Mr. Timipre Sylva on Monday allayed fears of staffers of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), over the alleged plan of scrapping the oil outfit in the wake of the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).
The Minister assuaged the fears while fielding questions from journalists at the National Assembly after an interactive session with the leadership of the federal parliament saying the bill seeks for commercialization and not scrapping of the NNPC.
“We have heard so much noise about NNPC being scrapped but that is not envisaged by the Bill at all.
” NNPC will not be scrapped but commercialized in line with deregulation moves being made across all the streams in the sector comprising of upstream, downstream and midstream.
“We have said that NNPC will be commercialized. But If you are talking about transforming the industry, the only new thing that we are introducing is the development of the midstream, that is the pipeline sector – that sector between the upstream and the downstream which because the framework was not there has not really developed very well.
“So we have provided robustly for the growth of the midstream sector.
” Through commercialization, the required competitiveness in the sector will be achieved,” he said.
The minister added that host communities will also get the best deal from the bill.
According to him, through the PIB, the industry will be transformed and the PEF and the PPPRA will not exist in the same form that they exist today.
“But I don’t want want to go into the details of the Bill until it is read on the floor of the Senate,” he said.