The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) the agency saddled with regulation of the oil and gas industry has assured that it is set to transform in all its operations and processes in line with global industry standards.
Speaking recently on his plan, the Director of the DPR, Mr. Augustine Olorunsola said he would beam his spotlight on attitude change, upscale technology usage and ensure private sector participation to take the company to the next level.
The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) the agency saddled with regulation of the oil and gas industry has assured that it is set to transform in all its operations and processes in line with global industry standards.
Speaking recently on his plan, the Director of the DPR, Mr. Augustine Olorunsola said he would beam his spotlight on attitude change, upscale technology usage and ensure private sector participation to take the company to the next level.
He said one of the things he wants to achieve quickly is the enthronement of professionalism in the company. “I want to see that professionalism is established across all cadres in the organisation because you cannot regulate people who know more than you, and that is what we are seriously lacking,” so that is really where we have to start, he added.
Olorunsola decried the state of the oil regulator in terms of capacity building and modern working tools. He said there are operational benchmarks in the global industry and Nigeria is not different from other parts of the world and doesn’t have a separate specification different from operations in other parts of the world.
He noted that one of the things that had kept the DPR in a state that makes it look as if it is inefficient is because the agency has not really been innovative over time. He said: “We cannot be watchdogs today and be using the tools of 40 years ago. It doesn’t work like that. And you cannot be everywhere at all the time and you are not even suppose to be everywhere at all the time.”
He said: “Today, there are tools that can deployed, and one can sit in one’s office and will be watching everything he really wants to see whether in Lagos, Maiduguri or anywhere”. This is what has not happened in the DPR over time but stated his resolve to make this happen, so that workers can stay in the office and do their monitoring functions through deployment of technological devices.
The DPR chief said he understood the fact that there are not sufficient resources but noted that everything is not about money and also it is not the number of people that are involved in a project that matters but also their quality.
“If you like put 20 people in a project that requires much less number, you will be surprise you don’t particularly get the right quality you are looking for. So, part of what we should be doing, which I will say I’m the first person to be doing that, is to try to bring in some other people especially from the private sector that can help to turn the company around.
On the areas of funding and autonomy, which the organisation currently lacks, Olorunsola said all that will come with time. He said, for instance, that whoever has been following discussions on the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), autonomy is not in question at all, everybody knows it will happen.
What we don’t know is just the time. All that will come but before it comes, the first thing is to start cleaning your house to get the right set of people at all levels to be doing things in anticipation of the new world, which is a post-PIB world. It is a huge transformation we have to go into. People have to be accountable and transparent in the way they do their things and people have to be properly and quickly equipped, in terms of tools,processes and competences.
He said: “Each time you talk of transformation or you are trying to reorganise, people talk so much about funding. It is really not money that is the biggest thing, it is changing the attitude of people that is the real thing. There is nothing that the private companies are doing – Shells and Totals of this world, that we cannot do in DPR.
It is not everything that is about money, that doesn’t mean we (DPR) wouldn’t need a little beat of help in terms of funding, changing people’s mindset and changing people’s mental behavior. We will need all the help bringing in new set of tools that will need a huge some of money but I bet you the biggest thing that needs to be transformed is the people’s attitude.
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