30 October 2012, Sweetcrude, PORT HARCOURT – THE Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, has urged multinational companies operating in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector to comply fully with the provisions of the Nigerian Content Act.
Making the call in Port Harcourt on Monday in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, the association’s National Industrial Relations Officer, Mr Chika Onuegbu, also urged efforts by the government to ensure total enforcement of the provisions of the Act.
Onuegbu said full compliance by the multinationals with the provisions of the Act would achieve maximum transformation for the sector within the shortest time possible, but added that the lack of appropriate enforcement of the act had hampered the promotion of local contents and other major issues in the sector.
He decried, specifically, the laxity of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board, NCDMB, for not making enough effort to ensure total compliance with the provisions of the act.
He recalled that the board was set up to supervise, coordinate and ensure compliance of the Nigerian Content Act.
“It is rather disheartening that two years after the passage of the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act, 2010, the country is yet to notice any positive impact of the act.
“NCDMB needs to wake up and aggressively pursue and deliver dividends of the act to our people, communities and country.
“We want to see our people being trained and assigned accountabilities in critical disciplines of the oil and gas sector, not as figureheads for purpose of statistics,” Onuegbu said.
He asserted that the use of contract staffing and ‘casualisation’ had been on the increase because of misinterpretation of the act.
“The way the act is going is contrary to the global trends in the employment in the oil and gas industry,” he said.
Onuegbu said that an NCDMB partnership with labour unions would go a long way in making the act successful.
