AFRICAN BUZZ
NIGERIA:
GOING LOCAL
It was also mentioned that Chevron has trained 161 Nigerians
in welding, fabrication and craft for its Sonam Development
Project at the Nigerdock facility on Lagos’s Snake Island.
Among further initiatives, Chevron has sponsored four Nigerian
engineers for subsea engineering training in France, offered
further education scholarships to Nigerian seamen and helped
600 community graduates register for the Nigeria Oil and Gas
Industry Content Joint Qualification System.
Promoting ‘indigenisation’ in the Nigerian economy was the
subject of a recent LEX Africa seminar, which asked how foreign
investors were forging partnerships with local players, using
local content and local manufacturing capacity and transferring
valuable work skills. There was no shortage of success stories
emanating from the gathering in London.
The Escravos Gas-to-Liquids (EGTL) project in the Niger Delta
has provided jobs for more than 15 000 local people during its
construction phase.
Most noteworthy has been the massive job of fabricating and
integrating six modules of oil producer Total’s new floating,
production and storage offshore vessel (FPSO), which will
operate in the ultra-deep-water Egina oil and gas field 200km off
the Port Harcourt coast.
Regulatory incentives have included creating ‘pioneer’ status
for companies in developing economic sectors – such as
agriculture. This provides for tax holidays for certain periods of
time to stimulate enterprise growth and expansion.
There are also export duty incentives for locally produced
goods, while the federal government has also placed a ban on
access to foreign exchange for importation of certain items –
such as rice and cement.
The work, carried out at the Saipem and Hyundai Heavy
Industries yard in Lagos, took six million man-hours – creating
hundreds of jobs and bringing multi-dimensional development
in its wake. Importantly, an estimated USD5-billion in costs was
retained in Nigeria, instead of the expenditure going to foreign
economies, as has previously been the case with such projects.
Article compiled by Osayaba Giwa-Osagie, Senior Partner, Giwa-
Osagie & Co in Nigeria.
Other shining local content examples in the oil and gas sector
have been fabrication of the jacket for the Amenam drilling
platform at Warri’s Globestar shipbuilding yard; Saipem yard’s
manufacture of the Okpoho platform, and a well-jacket and
helipad for ChevronTexaco’s Mere-X, which was built by
Transcoastal Nigeria.
Rival company Chevron plays an active role in the Oil Producers
Trade Section of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry,
working with monitoring agencies and legislators on local
content development issues.
SOUTH AFRICA:
WASTE TURNS TO GOLD
Five years ago, Thabo Valoyi and John Katjedi were working
full-time jobs as sub-contractors at Anglo American
Platinum’s Mogalakwena mine in the Limpopo Province
All these large projects created jobs, built local capacity and
stimulated the Nigerian economy. On the subject of skills;
transfer and support for local communities by multinationals, oil
giant Shell has increasingly used locally made goods and service
companies and in 2017 concluded contracts worth USD760-
million with Nigerian companies.
Construction work in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
of South Africa. Today, these entrepreneurs are supplying
critical services to the mine – and providing jobs for more
than 50 people in the process.
Valoyi and Katjedi are the directors of Ahoy Enterprises,
which provides general maintenance and hazardous waste
management and disposal services. Ultimately, they aim to
expand the business beyond the mining industry, and grow
their staff complement even further as they provide a greater
range of services.
Ahoy Enterprises is the latest success story to emerge from
Anglo American’s enterprise development programme,
Zimele, which aims to build small businesses by including
them in the local procurement networks of their mining
operations.
Thabo Valoyi and John Katjedi, directors of Ahoy Enterprises.
10
African Mining October 2019
Ahoy Enterprises was founded in 2014 on the back of a small
contract from Mogalakwena, with a staff complement of exactly
four: the two co-founders, and two employees. Today they have
46 people on-site at Mokgalakwena alone, to maintain pollution
control dams and manage hazardous waste and any spillages
that occur during operations.
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