From Tayese Mike, Yenagoa

The Minister of State for Petroleum, Chief Timipre Sylva and the Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board, last Thursday hosted the Ist African Local content Roundtable(ALCR) discussion in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa state capital.

Declaring the ceremony open, the Minister said  holding the maiden edition of the African Roundtable discussion in a state where oil and gas was first recorded in commercial quantity in Africa and indeed Nigeria shows that the country was a leading example in content development.

He  commended the NCDMB for initiating the Roundtable discussion, saying by this effort, it has set the pace as the premier Local Content regulator in Africa and a worthy example to sister nations that seek guidance to institutionalize Local Content practices in their jurisdictions.

According to him, the partnership with APPO is also commendable as it will provide a sustainable structure for driving regional collaboration on local content matters.

“The objective of this pan-African Roundtable is to institutionalize peer review mechanism among Oil-producing countries on local content as a key development imperative for domestication and sustainable growth of Africa’s hydrocarbon resources”.

“Any country that aspires to achieve rapid and sustainable economic growth must put in place an economic model that enables its human capital to harness its natural resources to create wealth and economic prosperity”.

“Nigeria embraced this model by adopting local content as an economic development model for the oil and gas sector, in view of its abundant hydrocarbon resources estimated at 37 Billion barrels of crude oil and 202 TCF of gas reserves.

We define local content as value added to or created in the Nigerian economy by a systematic development of capacity and capabilities, through deliberate utilization of Nigerian services, human and material resources in the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

Through implementation of local content we have achieved significant growth in-country value addition from less than 5% in 2010 to 35% in 2021 and we have set an ambitious target to achieve 70% local content in the oil and gas sector by 2027.

“Our success story in the oil and gas industry has led to bold step to extend local content to other sectors of the Nigerian economy. As a caring African country, we have also considered it necessary to amplify the benefits of local content to our fellow African countries and that is the essence of the African Local Content Roundtable”.

He said, everyone  knows that decades of hydrocarbon production in Africa have not translated to the desired economic growth in our Continent.

According to Sylva, while over 15 African nations are producing and exporting crude oil, the sad reality is that our people have not benefitted maximally from this natural resource, either because we have not managed the proceeds optimally or we failed to domesticate the core operations of the industry.

“We must therefore use the opportunity of this RoundTable to initiate conversations around Local Content, share success stories, challenges and come up with policies that would deepen local participation and domiciliation in our respective countries.

One of the pathways for this desired collaboration and cross-country development is the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and I am pleased that we have a representative of AfCFTA in this forum.

Indeed, AfCFTA provides an opportunity to create a single market through the facilitation of free movement of goods, services and investment within the 54 member states of the Continent, creating access to 1.2 billion customers, with a cumulative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of over US$3.4 trillion. 

It is imperative that African oil-producing countries and their companies cooperate closely in developing and sharing capacities and capabilities to optimize the hydrocarbon deposits and achieve economic growth and development”.

“For example, we established the biggest  FPSO integration yard in Lagos, Nigeria and so many other facilities that can be used by other African countries.

It makes better business sense to partner with an Umbilicals producing plant in Angola, or a bolt manufacturing company in Niger Republic instead of going all the way to United States and Norway for the same products.

We must take firm decisions and develop policies and projects that would position our industry competitively and sustain our economy under the emerging energy transition.

The Federal Government of Nigeria took firm steps in this regard very recently, funding two strategic energy projects in Nigeria.  A 10,000 tons per day methanol plant and 500 million standard cubic feet per day gas processing plant in Brass, Bayelsa State and the Ammonia and Fertilizer plant in Akwa Ibom State.

“It is my expectation that the ALCR will become a signature event, leveraging on the wonderful foundations already built by APPO and rotating among all the African oil producing countries”.

In his speech, the co-host, Engr Simbi Wabote, who is the Executive Secretary of Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB) said Africa needed to start discussion on how the continent can use its Hydrocarbon resources to migrate into a renewable energy.

According to Wabote, NCDMB as the leading in the development of local content in the Oil and Gas sector decided to bring all African oil producers together for them to start the discussion. Saying sustainability and continue growth to tackle poverty situation in the continent to bring about energy sustainability for the people is key to African leaders.

” I think its time for African to begin to come together on how to use their resources to migrate into a renewable one. The discussion is about climate change which we believe is somehow renewable and that has become topic all over the world”, he said.

He said with the threat of the climate change, what it portend for Africa is that very soon the natural resources that the continent has not even tapped will not be useful anymore. “Therefore we need to start the discussion on how we can use our hydrocarbons resources to migrate into a renewable energy. That is very important to us”.

Engr Wabote said why the local content roundtable is symbolic is because in Africa continent and the World, everybody knows that Nigeria is leading in local content when it comes to oil and gas sector.

“We have so many African countries that have come to jaw-jaw with us to learn the strategy on how to develop local content in the hydrocarbon sector. For us we feel we are the leader in that sector, we need to bring other African countries together in other to develop the local content since for them they are just discovering hydrocarbon resources and the discussion is how to migrate into energy”.

Wabote, who highlighted the achievements made by Nigeria in the last few years in the implementation of the local content policy, said the per centage of local content participation have been moved from 35 per cent to 70 per cent under his watch,” the local content policy in Nigeria has created indigenous contractors that are capable and strong, we have local participation in the vessels ownership”