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Stakeholders in Nigeria’s Oil and Gas industry are concerned about the deteriorating condition of over $8 billion worth of fabrication assets scattered across the country which are in disuse.
The stakeholders argue that the only remedy is heavy investment in the sector which has been lacking for the past ten years, adding that it would cost the economy more to reactivate this dying sector when investments eventually resume.
Already, over 10,000 workers of diverse skills have been thrown into the unemployment market because of a series of retrenchments which have taken place in the last year.
The stakeholders urged government , the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the oil companies, to resolve their differences to open the way for serious investments into the upstream sector of the oil and gas industry.
According to them, the ugly scenario the fabrication yards are going through has been due to lack of investment in the oil and gas sector and has led to many projects being abandoned by the oil companies.
Diran Fawibe, managing director and chief executive officer of International Energy Services( IES) advised that the (NNPC) should not allow the fabrications yard to die, saying good investments in upstream could improve the fortunes of the yards.
Fawibe said even though some of the IOCs were complaining of the yards being substandard, the NNPC should liaise with them to know what type of equipment they would like to see in place in the yards so that the companies can put them in place.
Another industry operator who confirmed the development to BusinessDay on condition of anonymity, said there was enough infrastructure in terms of fabrication yards in the country for the needs of the Oil and Gas industry.
He said: “May be collectively as yards, we have not achieved 100 percent but we give Nigeria enough of what she needs”.
He said the problem was that contracts had dried up, making the yards unable to continue to function and that consequently, they started retrenching. He observed that once a company retrenches, it takes time to bring back workers of the right quality and that this would further lead to additional cost.
“By so doing, we are breaking the ability of Nigeria to serve itself. Without projects feeding these facilities, whether it is fabrication, engineering, supply chain, infrastructure or logistics, the economy cannot grow because this is a collective thing.”
He therefore urged the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to reach an agreement with the international oil companies( IOCs). He said the solution is for the NNPC and IOCs to agree on a strategy to bring work back to the yards
Patrick Daziba Obah, acting executive secretary, Nigeria Content Monitoring Development Board (NCMDB) in a recent comment on the situation at the fabrication yards, appealed to Nigerians that whatever leakages that exist in the oil and gas industry should be sealed, so that more jobs can be created because a lot of fabrication yards are dying from lack of jobs, “ If we sit down and begin to add some coloration, then of course the situation would remain the same.”
Obah said “what is needed now is to tell people that we have fabrication yards that can build things to world-class specifications.
“But going forward, we must expand the frontiers of the local content to other sectors so that there could be more jobs. For instance, the construction industry makes use of structured materials and if they patronise the fabrication yards they would be very busy.”
Isreal Nweke, technical assistant to the chairman of the company, said that most of the jobs that are regular in the Oil and Gas industry now are very small fabrication items and that companies which have invested heavily in machinery would need more than small jobs.
Olusola Bello
