Ejiofor Alike
The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Mr. Simbi Wabote has disclosed that about $5 billion out of the $20 billion spent annually in Nigeria’s oil and gas is retained in-country as a result of seven years of implementation of the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development (NOGICD) Act of 2010.
Speaking in Lagos at the recent inauguration of the new national executive council of Oil and Gas Trainers Association of Nigeria (OGTAN), Wabote stated that the target of the NOGICD Act was to retain $10 billion of the yearly expenditure.
He restated that before the NOGICD Act was signed into law, all fabrication, engineering, and procurement were done abroad resulting in estimated capital flight of $380 billion in 50 years, while estimated job lost opportunities was in the region of two million.
“The narrative then was that nothing can be done in-country. Plants and modules fully fabricated offshore together with the technical, and even non-technical, manpower were ‘imported’ into the country without any structure in place to achieve knowledge transfer. The level of Nigerian Content was far less than five per cent,” he said. Wabote, who spoke on “Increasing indigenous participation and capacity development in the oil and gas industry – The journey so far,” also revealed that the country currently has five pipe coating yards and two pipe mills out of the four pipe mills targeted before 2010.
“Before 2010, only three per cent of marine vessels are Nigerian owned or Nigerian flagged; today, we have 36 per cent of marine vessels owned by Nigerians. Before 2010, we had no active dry-dock facilities. The few we had were abandoned and left to rot away. Today, we have four active dry docking facilities in Port Harcourt, Onne, and Lagos. Over 35,000 jobs have been created on the back of implementation of the Act. Over 7,000 have enrolled on NOGIC Joint Qualification System (JQS), leading to employment. We are in discussion with an ICT consultant to use the JQS to capture more enrolments,” Wabote explained.
He declared that with the NOGICD Act in place, it is no longer optional or debatable whether to comply with the law.
According to him, the Act has set minimum targets in 278 services across oil and gas value chain, with a provision for sanctions over non-compliance.
He also hinted that regulations are being developed to cover other area not fully addressed in the Act such as power, construction, and ICT sectors.
In his speech, the new OGTAN President, Dr. Mayowa Afe stated that OGTAN is an independent umbrella group of training service providers in the oil and gas sector, established by the NCDMB Act.
According to Afe, OGTAN represents the education and training sectoral group of the Nigerian Content Consultative Forum (NCCF) under Section 58 of the NOGICD Act.
Afe said the purpose of the group is to build local human capital capacity in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector, and also acts as a business group that interfaces with the operators, IOCs and the federal government.
