Members of the House of Representatives Committee on Petroleum Resources (Training Fund) have lamented that due to the low manpower development for Nigerians in the oil and gas sector, the industry is still dominated by expatriates.
According to them, the practice is undermining Nigeria’s drive to strengthen its local content drive in the sector, stressing improving the local human capacity in the oil and gas industry will address capital flight and shore up the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country.
Speaking, a member of the committee, Amobi Ogah, regretted that not much had been done to train local workforce to boost the sector.
He said, “The mandate (of the Training Fund) is meant for the training of capacity in the areas of oil and gas but today. We cannot really say that the agency has done much in training our people locally.
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“Today, we are still hiring foreigners to either rebuild or maintain our refineries and one of the major reasons for setting up this agency is for the purpose of developing our people, capacity, ability, to make sure that we move from overdependence from the foreigners in oil and gas to local level.
“But till now that mandate they have, they have not even gotten 10 per cent of it. This 10th Assembly would go a little far to see actually if they are doing as their mandate demands.
“We have been talking about local content. Local content does not only mean for contracts it also applies for staff training especially as it has to do with technological training.
“We discover that most of the expatriates in the oil and gas sector are flown from overseas. And I feel if we are able to ensure that our indigenous staff in the sector are trained, it would reduce capital flight in this country.”
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