SAIPEM: Local Content has given significant opportunities to Nigerians

The deep water operations like I said before now, is high technology deployment and I know that if you are conscious about your investment, if you are conscious about building capacity, you will be able to have takeaways from what is involved. What local content has brought to us is Engineering; Installation Engineering and Offshore Engineering, support vessels. There is a trajectory that has changed; there is a paradigm shift from being scared of the Atlantic to loving the Atlantic; Nigerians love the Atlantic now because there is belief that there is something there for everybody. So the deep water project is an advantage to open up the Nigerian system, especially for our Engineers, currently we have subsea Nigerian Engineers that have gone deep in excess of 150 kilometers to do installation and we are really proud of them, we are hoping that as more projects come, we would be able to train more Nigerians to take on the challenges. Nigerians like opportunities; they like to take opportunities when they see them. As we continue to build capacity, we do a lot of training and retraining; for every project, we train graduate Engineers on various competences. Electrical instrumentation, mechanical, civil, and all relevant disciplines in engineering that has a lot to do with project delivery. So as we turn them out, integration plan may not be automatic but if the project is available we just integrate them. And these guys over a period of time will key in into high technology competency. Right now we have over six Nigerian Engineers in Milan, Nigerian Engineers that are involved in the NLNG Train 7 FEED phase. And we have over 63 Nigerian Engineers working in Port Harcourt in a COREN registered office doing the same design with the support of very committed Expatriates.

Mr. Uzoma Akalabu, is the

Nigerian Content Manager for SAIPEM Contracting Nigeria Limited.