African nations seeking to achieve economic prosperity must develop local capabilities to process, utilise, and export their resources as a means of powering their growth and development, the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board, Simbi Wabote said on Tuesday.
Wabote made the submission in his presentation at the ongoing 2023 Africa Energy Week in Cape Town, South Africa.
He regretted that most African nations lacked requisite local capacities in key areas of the oil and gas industry such as Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Fabrication, Installation, Commissioning, and Operation, and that resulted in the loss of job creation opportunities, revenues, skills acquisition, and other aspects of national development.
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“A further negative impact is that those broad categories take a significant proportion of the oil and gas industry expenditure, hence it is expedient for oil-producing nations to develop local capabilities that would ensure that those financial outlays are retained in-country,” he said.
Advising on the strategy for enhancing local content capacity in African nations,Wabote stated that one important plan is to make local content a national agenda and back it with the appropriate legislation or legal framework in their respective jurisdictions.
He noted that “periodic gap analyses are essential to determine gaps that need to be closed and the progress being made in the target areas of interest.
He insisted that local content is not ‘copy and paste’, hence local peculiarities must be factored into programmes aimed at enhancing local capabilities.”
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