More than five decades after Nigeria formally commenced
crude oil exportation and production, and over three decades since the
Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) was established mainly for
creating a significant pool of skilled Nigerians for the developing the
country’s petroleum industry, it is deplorable that the Nigerian manpower
content in Africa’s largest oil and gas industry remains at 40 percent.
Stakeholders have given reasons for this scenario.
Allegations range from the preference of foreign oil companies for expatriate
personnel instead of Nigerian personnel, whether they are competent or not, to
claims by the oil companies that there are not enough Nigerians with the
necessary technical skills suited for a technology-intensive oil industry.
The inability of Nigeria’s educational system to provide
well equipped and adequate domestic technical manpower evidently substantiates
the latter claim. The dynamics of the political and economic environment in
which these institutions operate is partly to blame. Appointments to top positions
in universities have been politicized.
The critical role of the Nigerian university system in
generating efficient and adequate manpower capacity for the diverse sectors of
the Nigerian economy cannot be over-emphasised. For decades the system’s ability
to perform this role has been increasingly undermined by poor funding of the
universities. Hence, their inability to acquire updated technology for training
students and the poor teaching and research environment which has not been able
to attract high-flying members of faculty with proportionate town and gown
technical exposure.
It is not uncommon to read and hear employers of labour in
the country expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of graduates from
Nigerian universities. Severally, practitioners in the petroleum industry have
described Nigeria’s geology and geophysics graduates as “half-baked and
unemployable” as they hardly comprehend the practical aspects involved in oil
exploration and processing. Similarly, engineering students from Nigerian
universities have had much difficulty competing globally because the academic
curriculum and laboratories are obsolete, and the teaching faculty largely lack
he required industry exposure.
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