Nigeria's graft-hit state oil giant to get 'forensic' audit

Abuja (AFP) - The lawyer charged with cleaning up Nigeria's corruption-hit state oil company said Thursday he would lead a forensic audit of its accounts -- and warned no worker's job was safe.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation's new managing director Emmanuel Kachikwu said the investigation would cover "all the way to 2014, 2015" and would include a review of all contracts and production-sharing agreements.

"Having said that things have been done wrongly, things need to be done rightly," he told reporters in the capital Abuja, vowing to end the "anything goes" culture at the company.

Turning to a recent clear-out which has seen the removal of the entire board as well as 38 senior managers, the Harvard-trained former ExxonMobil executive warned low-level workers were next in his sights.

"If you have not done well enough and we can retrain you, we will. But if you have not done well enough and there is no possibility of retraining you, we will let you go," he said.

"At the end of the day, NNPC isn't a public service, it is a corporation and it is going to be run like a company, generating money and profit for Nigerians."

Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer, churning out roughly two million barrels of crude per day.

Ordinary people have largely not benefited from the nation's oil wealth, however, with much of the revenue lost to corruption.

The NNPC is regarded as one of the world's most opaque and corrupt publicly-controlled oil firms and has been linked to the massive theft of vast crude revenues.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to power on May 29 having been elected on an anti-corruption ticket, appointed Kachikwu earlier this month to carry out his promised reforms.

"It is a very intensive and calibrated work. A lot of us are not spending time sleeping," Kachikwu said.

"But over the next five, six months you will begin to see a new emergence in the NNPC, a new process of oil administration in the country, and obviously giving a fillip to Mr President's dream of taking the oil industry back to where it should be."