INTERVIEW
“Our People Need to Deliberately Take Advantage of Opportunities or Foreign Nationals will” - Okwuosa years ago. T his Law has helped to institutionalize the d e v e l o p m e nt o f sustainable local capacity in the Oil & Gas industry.
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ngr. Emeka Okwuosa is the Chief Executive Officer of Oilserv Group Limited; a sea soned eng i neer, 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 24
Majorwaves Energy Report
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? MAY- JUNE 2019, Vol 2 No 3
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.
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