To achieve the target of reducing the cost of oil production on a sustainable basis, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has advised indigenous companies in the nation’s oil and gas sector to upscale capacity for global competitiveness.
Its Group Managing Director, Mallam Mele Kyari, stated this at a virtual stakeholders’consultative summit organised by the Senate Committee on Local Content.
According to its Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Dr. Kennie Obateru, the NNPC GMD said there was the need to amend the Local Content Act to reflect realities in the industry.
Represented by the Group General Manager, Corporate Planning & Strategy (CP&S), Mrs. Eyesan Oritsemeyiwa, the GMD said there was the need to have a legislation to resolve the issues of funding challenges faced by local players, stressing that oil and gas business required high technical skills and competence to compete favourably at the global stage.
On the need for greater capacity building for indigenous companies, the GMD said the education system has a great role to play in the development of skilled technical manpower, adding that any legislation on Nigerian content development that fails to embrace issues of investment in the educational system was not likely to achieve much.
“In terms of the interaction between industry and education, we think these new bills would present a good model that we should work with. People are the greatest assets of any nation. If you have the best brains in the industry today, as long as you are not getting good replacement for them from the educational sector when they grow old and retire, then your industry will collapse,” the GMD said.
He said the nation has made some good progress from the era when there was no single indigenous operator in the oil and gas industry to the current situation where local operators have risen to double digits, stressing that the trend should be encouraged.
He hailed the National Assembly’s initiative to review and amend the Local Content Act and urged the committee to ensure that it is carried out in a timely fashion in order for the law to deliver maximum value for the nation.
The GMD commended the legislators for the plan to extend the local content law beyond the oil and gas industry to other sectors of the nation’s economy, stressing that it would open up the non-oil sectors to growth and development.
