“We undertook deregulation at the time nobody thought it was possible and if there’s anything we leave for this industry, it must be the legacy of that deregulation. Today our consumption of fuel has gone down by 30 per cent; we have no queues in the filling stations; we have one and a half months of self sufficiency; we have strategic reserves in place that we are putting together and we have a funding scheme to enable the downstream to be able to adequately fund itself. We have succeeded in removing subsidy and saving over N1.4tn for this country on a yearly basis. We have reduced upstream contracting period from the average of between two and half years to between six and nine months and we have started a massive commercialisation of every aspect of our business.The NNPC has been able to cut operational cost by 30 per cent, adding that Nigerian refineries had started working for the first time in about 10 years, but still not at the capacity that we want.We need to find a structure, and we have started, in which private funds will come into the refineries and we will be able to rebuild our refineries to 90 or 100 per cent capacity. I’ve already made a commitment that by 2018, 60 per cent of refined products importation will stop and by 2019 we must become a net exporter of refined petroleum products. I am happy to announce that in our May results, for the first time in the history of this company, the NNPC made a profit of N270m."

~ Dr. Ibe Kachikwu