“Why African countries must team up on local content initiative”

By Ambrose Nnaji

The Executive Secretary, Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Simbi Wabote, has re-emphasized the need for African countries to team up in hosting local content in the oil and gas sector. Wabote expressed the concern the collaboration was not getting the desired expectations.

He however agreed that collaboration among African countries in terms of local content development was ongoing. He noted that a lot of Nigerian capacities had been established working outside the shores of Nigeria at the moment in places like Uganda, Senegal and Kenya in terms of providing those services particularly in the seismic interpretation and feasibility studies.

He disclosed to the Nation Update during an oil and gas event in Lagos that Nigerian companies had ventured into those areas since the discovery of oil and gas in most of those countries including Ghana. Also in terms of providing some vital services, for instance chopper services, Helicopter services. “Today, Caverton, which is a company that started in Nigeria, is providing services to companies in Ghana”, so that effort to penetrate is ongoing but is it getting the desired grip, the answer is no”, the executive secretary asserted.

Caverton Helicopter services

He argued the idea now was to say how to continue to create a platform for this discourse, to demonstrate the existing capacities and to see how we get African countries to realize that all of these services that they desire in the oil and gas industry could be gotten from sister countries, which of course brings down cost of activity execution.

He said the African Free Trade Agreement provided a variable tool to share those services and reduce cost of activities in the oil and gas sector. Presently, “we recorded some successes but I think we could do more. I think with information and people realizing that next down the capacity does exist, potentially a lot of activities are expected to happen in that sector”.

There are a lot of areas, the oil and gas sector is very extensive, direct and auxiliary services from drilling, fabrications to catering activities, logistics, legal, financial services, and there is a lot to be done in the oil and gas industry.

But have we been able to tap those opportunities, the answer is no but we could do more because we have not scratched the surface in terms of regional collaboration and country to country collaboration in the oil and gas industry, he stated.