President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday appointed Mele Kyari as the new Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
A statement by the spokesperson of NNPC, Ndu Ughamadu, said President Buhari also appointed seven new Chief Operating Officers to work with Mr. Mele Kolo Kyari.
Kyari who hails from Borno State succeeds the incumbent GMD, Maikanti Baru, who is due for retirement from the NNPC in July.
Here are six things you probably don’t know about the incoming NNPC GMD, Mr. Mele Kolo Kyari;
1. Kolo Kyari is going to become the 19th Group Managing Director of the national oil company since the inception of the organization. This is according to the statement issued by NNPC’s Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Ndu Ughamadu.
2. He bagged his Bachelor of Science in Geology and Earth Science from the University of Maiduguri in 1987.
3. He was a former Nigeria’s national representative to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as he led the OPEC’s economic commission board which was in charge of reviewing the global oil markets.
4. Prior to his appointment at the OPEC, Kyari was a group general manager for crude oil division, which shows that he had been in the downstream sector for some time.
5. He began his career at the Nigerian Geological Survey Society as a field geologist from 1988 to 1991 before he became a seismic data geophysicist and IDSL, a subsidiary of the NNPC.
6. In 1998, he was in National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS) and then became the Abuja operations manager of the same organization. He became the head of the production contracts department between 2007 and 2009. In 2016, he was the supervisor of production sharing contract for the NNPC.