PTDF and skills gap in Nigeria’s petroleum industry
More than five decades after Nigeria formally commenced crude oil exportation,and over three decades since the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) was established for the major reason of creating a significant pool of skilled Nigerians for the development of the country’s petroleum industry, it is deplorable that the Nigerian manpowercontent in Africa’s largest oil and gas industry remains at 40%.
Certain reasons have been adduced for this scenario by stakeholders.
These range from the alleged sharp practices perpetrated by the management of the foreign oil companies that are accused of preferring expatriate personnel to Nigerian personnel irrespective of whether the Nigerians are competent or not to the claims by the oil companies that there is a paucity of Nigerians with the necessary technical skills needed in the high technology based oil industry.
The latter claim is evidently substantiated by the failure of the Nigerian university andtertiary educational system to provide well equipped and adequate domestic technical manpower, owing to what has been referred to as the dynamics of the political and economic environment in which these institutions operate.
The critical role of the Nigerian university system in generating efficient and adequate manpower capacity for the diverse sectors of the Nigerian economy cannot be over-emphasised. Yet the system’s credit in performing this role has been increasingly undermined over the decades following the increased poor funding of the universities, the inability of these universities to acquire updated technology for the training of students, and the poor teaching and research environment which has not been able to attract the high-flying members of faculty with proportionate town and gown technical exposure.
It is not uncommon to read and hear that employers of labour in the country are increasingly being dissatisfied with the quality of graduates from Nigerian universities. Severally, practitioners in the petroleum industry have described Nigeria’s geology and geophysics graduates as “half-baked and unemployable” as they hardly comprehend the practical aspects involved in oil exploration and processing. Similarly, engineering students from Nigerian universities have had much difficulty competing globally because the academic curriculum and laboratories are obsolete, and the teaching faculty largely lack he required industry exposure.
While it is not untrue that operators in Nigeria’s upstream oil sector are guilty of deliberately violating expatriate quota allocated to them or recruiting non-Nigerians to fill vacant positions that Nigerians can occupy on the basis of reasons bordering on mere prejudice against the idea of having Nigerians man the key technical areas of their operations, it is important that the relevant stakeholders address the decaying teaching and research infrastructure in the areas of science and technology based courses in Nigerian universities.
Corporate bodies that are concerned about this deteriorating state of facilities in the universities have been donating equipment, facilities and endowing chairs for research. Beyond this, some companies have committed resources to establishing training schools locally where they can add value to the ill-equipped Nigerian technology graduates. A good case in point is the Shell Training School in Warri established in the late 1990s where graduate recruits are made to go through an intensive training especially in areas where they are found deficient before they are finally assigned or certificated.
The much desired Nigerian content would continue to be significantly missing or marginal in the oil indstry so long as the universities that are vital human capacity building centres remain comatose.
The PTDF, and all relevant institutions, should effectively liaise with the technology based departments in the universities to find out their teaching and research capacities with a view to providing appropriate assistance rather than focusing on expending huge foreign exchange resources on sending students to already equipped universities overseas.