Nigeria’s state-owned oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Tuesday said the massive redeployment of 12 management staff of its exploration and production arm, Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), was aimed at repositioning the company to meet its production and reserve targets. The news had broken earlier in the day of what was described as a massive culling of the top cadre of staff at the NPDC, but at a briefing of the press at the NNPC head office in Abuja later in the afternoon, Roland Ewubare, NNPC’s chief operating officer, upstream, said the reorganisation became imperative following the urgent need of the current management to grow the NPDC into a big time exploration and production player in the country. According to Ewubare for the NPDC to measure up to its peers, it needed a team of professionals that were fit-for-purpose and could deliver on project timelines and budgets. Describing the culling as a routine exercise that would continue, he stressed that other staff that were not suitable for the posts they were currently occupying would be redeployed for national interest. With a presidential mandate, he said, it was necessary to have a team of professionals who understood the urgency of the mission and dismissed any insinuation that trailed the exercise. "The redeployment that just took place in NPDC is a signal to all members of staff that it is no longer business as usual. We are determined, as a management, to meet the four cardinal points of Transparency, Accountability with Performance Excellence (TAPE). Therefore, the redeployment has nothing to do with ethnicity, religion, or any sectional interest. The current NNPC management reflects all the six geo-political zones," said Ewubare at the briefing. He noted that NPDC was strategic, being the E & P arm of the NNPC, to the achievement of the target to grow the nation's reserves and production to 40 billion and three million barrels per day by 2023, adding that with the President Muhammadu Buhari’s clear mandate, the management was prepared to rejig personnel to meet the target. According to Ewubare, following the assumption of office by the present management, an evaluation of personnel was carried out which showed incompetence and compromise on the part of some staff, which necessitated the shake-up. He added that they also failed to provide efficient leadership for some of the assets needed to reposition the company. "I must put on record that the changes would continue until we get the right optimal managerial talents for the management of those critical assets," he said.