The Secretary-General of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Dr. Mohammad Barkindo, on Tuesday maintained that the glonal oil cartel remained committed to its core values in spite of the challenges in the oil industry.
The OPEC chief, who made this remark in his keynote address at the Mediterranean Gas (MedGas) event Dinner, at Athens, Greece, noted that in the last six years the oil industry and the organisation had been facing a lot of challenges.
Barkindo stressed that despite the odds, the oil cartel had never wavered from its core values, thereby enabling it to enjoy respect among nations, cooperation, dialogue, and also working toward collective solutions.
He said: “I have no doubt that these values can carry us forward to a brighter tomorrow. In a few weeks from now, I will complete my assignment as OPEC secretary-general, which began six years ago, on Aug. 1, 2016.
“The pace of change in world events over that time has been staggering. These changes have had major ramifications for the energy industry”, the industry expert added.
While reflecting on how best to synthesise many strands and facets of these changes, the Secretary General explained that the illuminating gateway to explain the trajectory was the recently concluded World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland.
According to him, the meeting, which held from May 22 to May 26, is the first of its kind since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He recalled: “The World Economic Forum in Davos, founded by Klaus Schwab, represents more than a meeting in the popular imagination.
“It is the platform for and exemplification of the virtues Schwab has extolled for the past half century: an interconnected world with free flow of goods, services, ideas and people contributing to shared prosperity, stability and peace. These aspirations have been shaken to the core by events of the last two years.
“Isolationism and protectionism, once confined to the fringes of political discourse, have received new prominence in elections across the world.
“Supply chains have struggled to adjust to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three decades of intensified globalisation risk going into reverse”, Barkindo added.
Recalling that there many discussions centred on nearshoring, onshoring and reshoring and the impact of rising interest rates and an end to the era of cheap borrowing, the former Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), now Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), noted that nothing had challenged the Davos worldview more than the war in Ukraine and the subsequent geo-political fallout.
Barkindo pointed out further that certainly, there had been a lot of column inches and boardroom discussions devoted to questions regarding the future of globalization, adding that investment patterns that have dominated the last three decades are also being put to the test.
He listed some of the patterns as including, the idea of corporations opting for cheap offshore manufacturing, slick global supply chains holding costs down and keeping inflation levels low.
The Secretary General said: “The question now is whether the momentum behind globalisation is shifting toward local sourcing. Attention in public discourse has gravitated toward issues such as so-called ‘supply chain sovereignty’ and domestic production facilities.
“The deployment of sanctions and attempts to sever some countries from the global economic system has seen fractures in geopolitics spill into the economic sphere.
“And we should not be under any illusion that the attempt to ‘decouple’ economies or reverse globalisation is a product of the 2020s”, Barkindo added.
He further explained that this had been a mantra for many politicians over the last few decades even as many communities have expressed grievances at missing out on the opportunities that come from globalisation, or feel they have been aggrieved as a result of it.
