Things appear to be looking up for National Engineering and Technical Company Limited, a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, which is now a profit making organisation unlike before

By Samuel Ibezim

FOR the National Engineering and Technical Company Limited, NETCO, a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, good times are here now. In the past two years, the company is not only self-sustained, it has also been paying dividends to the NNPC, its parent company.

The company management under Siky Aliyu, managing director, appears to have turned the NETCO around not only to get engineering job from the NNPC, it has also been getting patronage of other companies as against the past. Little wonder the NETCO is now the number one engineering company in Nigeria which makes it an envy of other companies in oil and gas sector.

In an interview with Realnews in his office on Tuesday, March 13, Aliyu said that NETCO had produced a lot of engineers in the industry. The company is also involved in procurement and construction as a surplus to its existing engineering work. He disclosed that the company had also been in partnership with other local companies to execute projects.

The NETCO boss explained that all the achievements were made possible because of the company’s unrelenting efforts to convince the NNPC to patronise it. He said the response was positive because Maikanti Baru, group managing director, NNPC, was convinced the company could deliver. Since then, the NNPC has domiciled all the front-end and engineering designs in NETCO. “With his (Baru) being there, he has given us a lot of opportunities to compete for a number of jobs and since his going there, we have actually been able to get quite a number of jobs,” Aliyu said.

To demonstrate his zero tolerance for idleness, Aliyu said he had to find works for more than 300 NETCO staff and 53 who were idle because of no work and he could not sack them. “As I am talking to you now,” he said, “there is no engineer in NETCO that is not on one project or the other. So from 53, non-assigned it is now zero. So, that for me this is a very big achievement. Not only that, by the kind of patronage we have been getting from NNPC, we have been doing quite a number of NNPC projects. We have gotten NNPC support also to increase our IOC project portfolio.”

This, indeed, has made the company profitable and able to pay dividends of N610 million to the NNPC within four years.

Proudly, Aliyu assured that 2017 financial report would be more profitable than the previous years. “The plan is to have our AGM in the first week or second week of April at the latest. And of course, the books are looking good, we are looking forward to declaring even more profits,” he said.

– Mar. 24, 2018 @ 5:05 GMT |