· Stakeholders in the oil industry earnestly anticipate the screening of the new NNPC boss
· Pundits claim it’s a walk in the park for the suave technocrat
By Lanre Alfred
It’s extremely hard to describe the spasms of curiosity and pleasure coursing through the planes and circuits of Nigeria’s corridors of power right now. It’s even harder to illustrate the anxiety and excitement surging through the veins and communes of the country’s citizenry. Every politician, technocrat, banker, journalist, trader, lobbyist, power broker and trust-fund baby whose fortune is directly or indirectly tied to the success or failure of the man vested with the task of sanitizing the nation’s oil industry and improving the fortunes of the sector, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, can hardly wait to see him emerge on the floor of the National Assembly.
The new Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is coincidentally a ministerial nominee of President Muhammadu Buhari and the country’s formal and informal political and business sectors can hardly wait to witness his session with the senators in the country’s Eighth Assembly tommorrow.
As the lawmakers interviewed President Buhari’s first set of ministerial nominees, Nigeria waited with baited breath to witness Kachikwu’s session in the senate. Even the senators conducting the interviews could be seen craning their necks and asking in hushed tones for the time belt in which Kachikwu’s session has been slated.
Prominent young oil Turks, veteran oil magnates and international expatriates with monumental stakes in the oil industry are particularly anxious to see Kachikwu make his presentation and answer questions on the senate floor, concerning his plans and capacity to improve the fortunes of the ailing oil sector.
Kachikwu in a nutshell, is expected to reenact the good that holy images do: perfect our understanding about the oil industry, exorcise us of corruption, move our will, refresh our memory and realign stakeholders in the sector to a worthier and more patriotic purpose in enterprise.
The bulk of expectations trailing him to the venue of the ministerial screening in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) is somewhat scary. Kachikwu’s deportment in the House is expected to instantly cause every stakeholder in the oil sector to seek virtue, shun vice, and thus set the oil industry on the path of lawfulness, prosperity and due process.
However, pundits claim that the much anticipated grilling of Kachikwu would be a walk in the park for the NNPC boss. Kachikwu is notable for his oratory, infectious wit and brilliance in such fora. “He will have everybody eating from his palms,” stated a very close aide to the NNPC boss.
Since he assumed duties as new NNPC boss, profiteers from the erstwhile corrupt regime of the nation’s oil sector have been forced to beat a retreat from the famished path of commercial banditry and despise for due process. Following their inability to woo him and induce him to compromise, they resorted to a smear campaign to sabotage his efforts at ridding the oil sector of corruption.
At his appointment by President Muhammadu Buhari, not a few pundits and stakeholders in the oil industry dismissed him as just another egg-head afflicted with the onerous task of sanitizing the nation’s petroleum sector but his first few weeks on the job unfurls like the dreaded epoch of reckoning, to centuries of plunder, duplicity and institutionalised corruption.
The oil corporation until Kachikwu’s emergence had been administered for years like a slush fund machinery rather than a business enterprise. Consequently, most of the Joint Venture (JV) agreements it entered into with multinational oil companies were not adequately funded. This also affected the Production Sharing Contracts (PSC) with the MNCs operating in the country and has led to a situation in which NNPC had to take questionable loans from these same oil companies under ill-defined arrangements such as Modified Carry Agreements (MCA) and Alternative Funding (AF).
But Kachikwu is no doubt up to the task, so argued his close underlings and business associates. No sooner did he assume duties than he effected a convulsive shake-up in the NNPC; he sacked perceived saboteurs and moved to plug the innumerable leakages of fund and mineral resource afflicting the nation’s oil sector. Besides this, Kachikwu influenced positive changes in the nation’s oil sector by working in consonance with the plans of President Buhari to sanitize the sector.
It would be recalled that the former administration of the NNPC allegedly conspired with a shady oil cabal to fleece the nation of petroleum business proceeds; the oil corporation’s management was allegedly subservient to the supremacy and influence of a clique of oil magnates working in connivance with a highly permissive government. Thus the several shady deals and outright theft of oil subsidy funds perpetrated by the sacked NNPC management in conjunction with the certain oil magnates. The latter who have since been placed under intense scrutiny and investigations by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) are yet to recover from recent corrective measures instituted by the new NNPC boss in consonance with the wish of the incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari, to rid the oil corporation and the petroleum sector of endemic corruption.
A Doctor of Law, Kachikwu graduated with distinctions from the University of Nigeria Nsukka and the best graduating student from the Law School, winning seven of the available nine prizes in 1999. He holds the LLM Harvard Distinction and was best graduate in 1980 with specialisation in Energy, Petroleum Law and Investment.
Kachikwu set a record with a Ph.D/SJD Harvard Distinction, specialising in Petroleum and Investment Law Strategie after completing his doctoral thesis in a record time. With a H.Dip.T.L from Georgetown, the United States of America (USA), the new NNPC chief executive is a Fellow, Society for Corporate Governance (FSCG); Chartered Institute of Arbitration (FCIArb); Chartered Institute for Petroleum Policy (FCIPP) and a Visiting professorship in various universities in the world including Harvard Law, his alma matter.
Kachikwu has more than 30 years experience in policy- making positions in petroleum industry including; General Counsel/Legal Adviser, Texaco Nigeria and Texaco Overseas Petroleum Co (1984 -1994); General Counsel/Secretary, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited (2001); Executive Director, ExxonMobil Group of Companies (2003).
He has been the Executive Vice Chairman/General Counsel, ExxonMobil Companies in Nigeria and Oversight Counsel, ExxonMobil Companies in Africa since 2009 and his accomplishments include the authorship of several law books including the best seller , “Nigerian Foreign Investment Law and Policy” and over 20 other publications.
Kachikwu Influenced over $10 billion investment from ExxonMobil Group into Nigeria and other African countries and it is on record that he set major policy planks on government relationship, investment policy and corporate governance for ExxonMobil in Africa and member of many highly influential policy and investment teams for ExxonMobil Corporation.
He served as a lead negotiator on diverse issues for ExxonMobil in Africa including conclusion of Lease Renewal Negotiations for Mobil Producing and facilitated solid contacts in Global Energy Sphere with contacts to most Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of multinational petroleum corporations and secretaries of energy for key national country players for more than 25 years.