"I doubt that the amount that the government will be prepared to pay will be lower than what they had this year or last year," Bayero told Reuters in an interview.

But the impact of this year's oil price slide on NNPC revenues means it has had to ask foreign partners to trim back some bolder plans for next year, he added.

"Because of the low oil price we have to go over again to see where we can either postpone or delay some of the work programme," he said.

"We told them to go back to the drawing board and look at it all over again. Maybe in the next one or two weeks we can get something out."

Nigeria has recently improved its record in meeting cash calls to joint venture partners such as Shell, Chevron, Elf and Agip to placate bitter complaints that theshortfall in NNPC contributions was thwarting expansion plans.

Nigeria's military ruler Abdulsalami Abubakar in June pledged to fulfil the $2.5 billion NNPC commitments agreed for this year. The monthly cash call payments had previously been paid at the 1997 rate of $2.05 billion.

Foreign firms had threatened to cut back drilling and development plans if NNPC did not pay up.

Bayero added that Nigeria wanted to put structures in place to ensure that the country's new government would go through with plans to privatise parts of NNPC after May's presidential elections.

"I think they are going to try to do what they can to such an extent that any government that comes in will find it very difficult to change the position," he said.

"That structure will be put in place but there is very little time."

He said the government could consider several potential ways of divesting Nigeria's average 57 per cent joint venture share in its prized upstream sector.

"There are all sorts of options. Convertingexisting joint ventures into production sharing or into joint companies; merging some of the joint venture arrangements, or reducing our equity from 57 per cent to something below 40 percent," he said.

But he doubted that there was enough time to embark on any privatisation of Nigeria's upstream assets before the elections.

"I don't think the time is enough for anybody to assess and evaluate these companies. It's a long process. It will take more than four to six months."

Nigeria, Africa's biggest producer, wants to push production up to 3.5 to 4 million barrels per day by 2010 from around two million bpd now, he said.

NNPC is getting less interest in its plans to privatise its ramshackle refineries, admitted Bayero.

Nigeria's petroleum products are heavily subsidised, while repeated refinery breakdowns have forced the country to import gasoline.

"I don't see any company buying into these refineries until there are certain things put in place such as putting back the refineries back into goodshape and taking steps to produce a proper price for the products," he said.