Nigeria needs to use the current Middle East crisis as the opportunity to totally revamp her petroleum industry, modelling the NNPC along the same lines as Malaysia’s Petronas

Ayo Akinfe

[1] Nigeria’s economic woes all stem from the fact that we are not productive enough as a people. Our Southeast Asian brethren have shown us the way to get out of this rut, especially the South Koreans with their conglomerates known as chaebols, such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai and Malaysia with Petronas

[2] Created in a manner identical to Nigeria’s NNPC, Petronas is Malaysia's national petroleum corporation and accounts for 50% of the Malaysian federal government’s budget

[3] Petronas subsidiary Malaysian Marine and Heavy Engineering builds oil rigs and platforms

[4] Petronas Fertiliser Kedah manufactures urea fertiliser. Petronas is also massive in the global petrochemicals industry

[5] Petronas subsidiary KLCC Properties Berhad manages Kuala Lumpur city centre

[6] Petronas subsidiary Misc Berhad is one of the world’s largest shipping lines. It has the largest fleet of liquefied natural gas transport vessels in the world

[7] Petronas has also teamed up with local food and beverage companies, banks and transportation companies to provide better services at their petrol stations

[8] Petronas has a net income of $46bn, while Nigeria as a whole has an annual budget of just $30bn. Yet, Malaysia produces just 661,000 barrels of oil a day compared with Nigeria’s 1.5m barrels a day. As you can see, we are own enemies

[9] Despite being wholly state-owned, Petronas runs like a fully-fledged business. For some weird reason, state capitalism has simply refused to work in Nigeria. Elsewhere, Ghana’s Cocobod, Egypt Air and Ethiopian Airlines are all state-owned and they are thriving

[10] Basically, Nigeria needs about half a dozen conglomerates floated on say the London, New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo stock exchanges that diversify into an array of heavy industries like steel production, petroleum refining, automobile assembly, solar panel manufacturing, food processing, shipbuilding, power generation, etc. We need the NNPC to lead this charge, supported by the likes of Dangote Industries, Man of God PLC, Innoson Enterprises, Transcorp International, Isiagu Industries, etc

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