An international crude oil company (IOC); SLOK Group; operating in the upstream sector of the Nigerian oil and gas industry has lamented the absence of skilled and adequately trained manpower to operate aboard its oil tankers.
According to the Group Managing Director and Chief Operations Officer of SLOK Group, Mr. Joseph Nassif, little attention is paid to capacity building in the Nigerian oil and gas and shipping sector especially in the aspect of trained and skilled personnel to man and work aboard these ocean going vessels.
An international crude oil company (IOC); SLOK Group; operating in the upstream sector of the Nigerian oil and gas industry has lamented the absence of skilled and adequately trained manpower to operate aboard its oil tankers.
According to the Group Managing Director and Chief Operations Officer of SLOK Group, Mr. Joseph Nassif, little attention is paid to capacity building in the Nigerian oil and gas and shipping sector especially in the aspect of trained and skilled personnel to man and work aboard these ocean going vessels.
Nassif told Shipping Position Weekly last week in Lagos that the situation has negative effects on most international oil companies, and that they are the ones responsible for training of these hands in order to meet up to their required standards which according to him is not suppose to be so.
We as users of the capacity will like to see things done very fast because we are growing up our companies, we have more vessels but it is very difficult for us to find the people with the right skills, so what we end up doing is to send some of them overseas which is expensive in order to get them properly trained”, he lamented, even as he added that: “We do a lot of training on board too to ensure that our crew is professionally trained, we do not like this, we will like to see them going to the proper institution and get the proper training to do the job”.
According to him, the situation degenerated to that level because the few institutions that Nigeria has are not up to the standard required by a lot of the international oil companies and that the capacity is limited, he however called for the establishment of more training institutions with international focus and standards in order for Nigeria to be able to meet the challenges of the upstream operations of the oil industry.
“The upstream is moving but not moving as fast we will like it to, you will see that more banks getting involved, you see the indigenous ship owners association of Nigeria already looking at the upstream, before it was always downstream focus but now they have focused on the upstream, more companies are starting to come out and making known their needs in terms of vessels and manpower, these are things that did not happen before but are starting to happen now”
Nassif commended the federal government for the Local Content Law which was passed by the legislature last year, saying that it was a move in the right direction. “It has a lot of move behind it, a lot of support and I expect it to be impacting significantly in the very near future, we are starting to see some results as a matter of fact”, he acknowledged.
He however stressed that “Cabotage has not had the impact it needed to have, but if you also ask stakeholders in the marine industry in Malaysia for instance which I just arrived from, it also took them up to twenty five years to get the Cabotage fully implemented in Malaysia, so it is not something to be done overnight”.
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