Engr. Emeka Okwuosa is the Chief Executive Officer of Oilserv Group Limited; a seasoned engineer, administrator, entrepreneur and a visionary with over 35 years of experience in the following areas: maintenance and operations, teaching, wireline logging and interpretation, seismic acquisition, processing and interpretation, pipeline engineering, procurement and construction (EPCIC), project management, drilling and drilling services. Some of these activities span Europe, North Africa, West Africa, Gulf of Guinea/Central Africa and Indonesia.
Emeka worked in various capacities for Schlumberger in positions that spanned Field Engineer to Technical Manager in the following parts of the World; Europe (Pau, France, Scotland), North Africa (Libya), West Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana), Gulf of Guinea/Central Africa (Nigeria, Benin Republic, Cameroun, Gabon, Congo and Angola) and Indonesia. Emeka is passionate about development of human capacity in high technology areas of Oil and Gas Industry. This is being achieved via various schemes that have been instituted through the companies that he has founded and runs. Together with other key practitioners in the Oil and Gas Engineering, Exploration and Production sectors, Emeka was instrumental to the enactment of Oil and Gas Local Content Law three years ago. This Law has helped to institutionalize the development of sustainable local capacity in the Oil & Gas industry.
Emeka is the founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of several companies that operate in the oil and gas industry in Africa. While speaking to Majorwaves Energy Report Team, on the sidelines of the Oil and Gas Trainers Association, OGTAN’s Annual Conference and Exhibition in Lagos, Engr. Okwuosa shares his perspective on Nigeria’s energy legislation, inadequate infrastructure and the need for continuous capacity development to take advantage of opportunities available in the Nigerian Oil and Gas sector; Excerpts.
Please give us highlights of your panel session at the OGTAN Annual Conference and Exhibition
I actually moderated and the presentations were built around the theme which is unlocking Nigeria’s potential through a comprehensive human capital development. It’s about how we develop the country by unlocking the potential of the country. What is potential? You can look at it as our various abilities that are undeveloped, our inabilities to develop these potentials tells you that the potentials mean nothing. Now, by unlocking these potentials we are able to develop our human capacity and then development of human capacity unlocks the potential also, it goes hand in hand and that’s the theme of what we discussed today.
Do you think we have the capacity to be unlocked in the first place?
We do have some capacities but the most important thing is that we have to develop these capacities because if we do not systematically develop the capacities, the capacities cannot develop themselves and we’ll end up with a multitude of people that have no skill set to be able to contribute to the economy of the country. They will become an impediment to themselves and the country and will be extremely negative especially in a place like Nigeria where population is ballooning without control. There is a need for us to act quickly. Some may say, it’s too late but I don’t think so. We have to work seriously and that requires putting the right structure in place and making sure the structure works. Because, if you train people and afterwards they are not able to be employed, it’s a problem. Finally, like I said also in the course of the presentation, we have to develop people to be entrepreneurs. This is so because, when people know that they can develop their own businesses, and can create value by using their acquired skill, we tend to build capacity even faster; that’s it.
Yours is a success story; virtually everyone in this industry makes references to you for good. We see chains of businesses that you have developed yourself despite the huge infrastructural deficit. How do you advice young entrepreneurs to surmount these hurdles?
What I tell them is simple. It starts from your values, the ethics you have. You need to understand that nothing is impossible. Also, you need to accept that, it’s not all the times in the world you will have a ready-made answer to everything. The fact that we have huge gap between where we should be and where we are today creates huge opportunities also.
These opportunities ought to be taken advantage of by the citizens of this country; otherwise other nationalities will grab them. There is a complaint and discussion around the influx of Chinese into Nigeria. If you recollect, few years back, Nigerians would visit and buy materials from China to sell here. Today, those Chinese have come in large numbers; they are in our markets, they go to every corner of our society, they set up, they break the rules and compete unfavourably. They are taking away jobs. What does that mean? It means that there are opportunities here that our people are not taking advantage of. Beyond the fact that I know that there are some illegality going on and are not being enforced, purely because we don’t have a system that works in that direction; the fact is about knowing that hard work in the right direction is at the background of every success. Don’t give up when you have opportunities. Opportunities are there, you have to look in the right direction to know they are there.
May I give you an example: do you realise today that agriculture alone can employ more than half of the people that are unemployed in Nigeria today?
What does it take to start an Agric venture! You don’t need to start it in a way that you are a millionaire over-night. We have a huge population all over and people must feed. There are two things you must do in life, you must breath and eat. Whether you wear clothes or not is irrelevant. Without these two you can’t survive. Fortunately, God gave us air. You don’t have to worry yourself to breath, the day you can’t voluntarily breathe, you are dead. But you have to get food for yourself. There is a reason why God did it that way. That process of you going to get food for yourself helps you develop a skill of survival. From survival, it grows into development of capacity. A lot of things revolve around feeding. I happen to have seen an individual who was trying to launch a cashew business, and I engaged him for over 30 minutes. After my analysis, he accepted he didn’t have to cultivate the cashew. There are other areas along the value chain that would still be lucrative. Cashew nuts were all over the place, people were not picking them. He could set up a processing plant; buy or gather and dry the nuts. The dryness can be measured and industry standard achieved. That is very possible. It will fetch him good money if he puts his mind to it. With the right mindset, irrespective of all the impediments in the society, nobody should give up.
Speaking from the angle of knowledge and skill transfer from the aging workforce in the oil and gas industry, do you think we have the right environment that encourages young people to be in the mix?
No we don’t have the environment, but it shouldn’t deter us, we also don’t have a government system that encourages employment. It isn’t about the current government or the immediate past. It is a system failure over the past three decades. We have failed to move in the right direction by the structure of government we have, the policies and our so-called constitution that doesn’t encourage growth. You can’t change that overnight. The process of changing it is almost impossible by the constitutional means. But we have to deal with it. Having said that; we don’t give up, because you have to survive and live a life, that means you have to solve problems.
A key thrust of this OGTAN conference is about companies collaborating despite these impediments for capacity building. What is the NCDMB today? To some who may not know, a couple of us that worked with Schlumberger in the 1980s came together around 1991 and 1992 and decided to set up Petroleum Technology Association of Nigeria, PETAN. After that event, some of us started coming out of Schlumberger to set up our companies, and we were coming from all over the world. One week, we had a meeting led by Ralph Ekezie and proceeded to meet the Group General Manager at NAPIMS, the late Dr. Bayero who later became GMD of NNPC. We demanded any sort of support to back us up in other to have local content, so we won’t be squeezed out of business because at that time, nobody would give you job. They would simply say you are not qualified. Everything went to the multinationals. The banks didn’t even have the capacity to fund you; there was no money. He expressed willingness to support us but explained that the right approach was through a policy as there was no policy to back his support. So he advised us to go to Abuja and talk to the military government.
So, we gathered ourselves and lobbied but nobody listened to us. We never gave up. We continued until we forced NNPC to set up the Nigerian Content Development (NCD) department in NNPC. The lobbying continued until the law was set up. We didn’t give up. Some people that work at NCDMB today may not know this history. When some of us go in there today, they will look at us as though we are foreigners, but we made it happen. I personally wrote the law sections on pipelines. The first thing that came out was that 40 per cent of pipeline jobs on land and swamp should be given to Nigerians but I said NO! I demanded 100 per cent! That’s because we are capable, and that’s how Nigerians started out. My point…we lobby, we don’t give up. You see the opportunity, you push for it. You can’t sit back and get solutions.
With Oilserv we have seen the push and steps. We want to know two things; first of all, what’s the next big thing for Oilserv and secondly, what’s the update on the AKK project?
It is an ongoing thing. I don’t look at the next big thing in Oilserv. This is about development and development means building capacity to be able to do more projects the same way we normally do with quality and timely delivery without accidents. AKK is moving on smoothly. AKK is a novel project in the sense that it’s the first time a project more than the value of 2. 7 billion dollars is being financed by Nigerians in the private sector. We are going through the process of raising the funds, and you know we can’t raise that finance in Nigeria. We are working on it, and NNPC have been very helpful. They have been working with the contractors, there are two contractors managing this, we believe that in the next few months you will see us on site, thank you
