Thursday, April 4, 2013

PIB and the NNPC: On Human Capacity Building


PIB and the NNPC: On Human Capacity Building

By

Bello Salihu, PhD


Last week’s piece was dedicated to examining questions that may arise as the nation awaits the passing of the PIB, particularly how elements of the bill are set to affect the NNPC, Nigeria’s national oil company - which is set to be have a name change that will hopefully fuse its efforts into a more targeted service delivery and also focus it to fewer areas in which it can build sound technical competence. 

Of the four cardinal objectives of the corporation at its inception, the first, that of building administrative and technical capacity will be singled out and discussed today vis-à-vis the corporation’s readiness to metamorphose into a globally relevant E & P company as envisioned by the PIB. Not because the other three original objectives of its formation, namely, formation of a functional, global and independent national oil company, encouraging local participation in the industry and ensuring national energy security are not important, but because, as has been demonstrated by other countries and their national oil companies, once the human capacity end is sorted, the rest will surely fall in line.

This is hoping this is looked critically by Nigerian lawmakers as they debate the bill in the not-so-distant future.

Next week I hope to discuss those synergies that if explored will bring about a robust and capable technical and managerial manpower not just for the NNPC but also for Nigeria, a country that is currently suffering from massive youth unemployment and under-employment. But before we discuss what shape such a synergy should take we need to understand, first of all, NNPC’s take on the all-important role of developing administrative and  technical capacity in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. It is only after doing that that we can see what the corporation is doing right (or wrong) in working with the other agencies to build a robust pool of technical and managerial expertise for the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

In the 1990s, as a young engineer starting out in the oil industry, while on a training programme on my then employer’s training in the south of France, I could remember being handed a vision speech made by the then new CEO of the then British Petroleum (now BP), Mr. John Browne (now Baron Browne of Madingley). We were told that the speech was circulated to all BP employees the world over and was seen by all as what will define the company's future in a soon to be challenging operating environment. Prior to John Brown's ascension to head BP, the company was beset will all manners of operational and fiscal difficulties.

There was a talk in the speech about BP moving from just a learning organisation to a teaching and learning organisation. Every member of staff involved in any project and at any level of involvement was tasked to bring it into the open and make it available to any one and everyone within the BP system to encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas - to achieve this all were encouraged to have an intranet webpage about themselves, their work and their contributions to BP's corporate goals using a then new-fangled tool called the 'Internet'. The aim is to cut costs and make BP the most cost-conscious of all its competitors in the international oil company (IOC) ranks.

Two things struck me then as they still do now. The first one was that the company I was working for then was a mere service supply to BP but saw, then, how intricately intertwined their future as a business was to wherever BP was heading - my former company recognised that fact enough to make us all, not only aware of but, buy into BP’s vision. Secondly, Browne's ability to communicate to all levels, high and low, of the importance of the seemingly little and inconsequential things that, will, in the long run, determine if BP survives as a business or not. 

Bringing it closer to what today’s article is about, since NNPC is the apex company whose various activities in the upstream, midstream and downstream drive the Nigerian oil and gas industry, actions and policies in the line of job creation championed or relegated by the NNPC will affect all contractors and suppliers to the entire industry which will cascade further down to the sub-contractors and suppliers connected to the corporation’s first line of service suppliers. This extensive chain continues and ultimately translates into the ability of a fifth line beneficiary of that contract signed by the first line supplier to employ an additional driver, technician or machine operator or even finance a small R & D project in their local university or polytechnic geared towards  a better product or service delivery. Along the line, thousands will be fed, sheltered, clothed or sent to school because a small part of an offshore field development or maintenance of a refinery or pipeline has been internalised within the country thereby creating value in the life of many Nigerians.

Looking at this cascading chain of value addition, the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Andy Yakubu, may be the single most important person in reducing the plague of unemployment in NIgeria. Because with a single decision from the corporation millions of jobs that are not necessarily on the corporations payroll can be created in the Nigerian economy overnight. But again, the vision or creativity to define, sanction and manage what jobs are to be created can only be taken by managers who are themselves empowered to do that through an effective human capacity building culture.

The NNPC of today does not seem to be structured to maximise the oft-mentioned enormous human resources that abound in Nigeria - both as a direct primary, secondary or tertiary beneficiary of such a resource and as a catalyst for the unleashing of massive job creation potential of a country of over 160 million people and in which nearly one hundred million are within the employable age and a higher percentage of that hundred million are either unemployed or under employed.

In the last few years, NNPC seems to have got its act together in the area of recruitment. Young professionals are now employed mostly based on merit after a rigorous, and mostly transparent, selection process. There has been numerous complaints about the process but then, coming from an era in which even that was not obtainable, one could excuse these flaws in the hope that eventually they will also be rectified.

But for the young people so lucky to be employed the new challenge is to seek professional fulfillment in a system in which their progression is mainly, for the most part, taken for granted. This is because, as long as they keep a low profile and do not step out of line, they are likely to get their promotions and advance up the system when due. This has rendered the corporation to be “top-heavy” since over the years - for many years - many have toed that line and risen up the corporation’s ladder. Very few of the NNPC’s over twenty-thousand employees enjoyed or, as long as this system remains the norm, will enjoy rapid career advancement and rise above their peers because of some professional or technical achievement linked directly to advancing the corporations core business(es) in either innovation or cost saving.

The elevation of Andy Yakubu from the ranks of group executive directors to become the current GMD over more senior colleagues could be an acceptance by the government of the day that unlike before proven talent into that position could be found within the corporation and need not be imported from the IOCs. 

This is hoping that this is not an aberration but a new culture that will be allowed to cascade down the entire corporation because In the NNPC’s current and future competitors the hierarchical system is mainly structured in such a way as to be ‘bottom heavy’. That way, only the very best rise to the top. The not so good will be confined to job roles commensurate to the level of promise they have exhibited and exposed to further training and development at that level.

In the last few instances when NNPC advertised for experienced professionals to join their ranks, the cut off age for the applicants as mandated in the adverts was pegged at 40 years. From what one gathered happened in the recruitment process, most of the professionals, who are mainly from the IOCs, that were able to scale through the process were placed in the early  or middle managerial cadre in the corporation. If the same professionals had been in the NNPC at the inception of their careers, it is very likely that they would have spent only a maximum of fifteen to eighteen years of services in the corporation. As things stand now, only few officers who joined the corporation’s service are managers after the such a length of time.

The corporation remains about the only employer in the Nigerian oil and gas industry in which one is hard pressed to find young officers in the engineering and technical job roles being handed positions of real responsibility before their tenth anniversary in the company. Most of the technical professionals who migrate from the international operating or contracting service companies operating in Nigeria on the other hand are handed technical and budgetary responsibility very early in their careers and challenged to prove their mettle to justify their employment. By their tenth anniversary with their employers, many of them have held such responsibilities in their companies’ other subsidiaries either within or outside the shores of Nigeria. For most of them, migrating to the NNPC is to secure their future with a company in which their age mates have not even start rising up the managerial ranks. I stand to be corrected but I feel very few of them move to the NNPC to seek more challenging technical roles.

This, in effect, should tell the NNPC that there is a need for a re-think in the way the corporation handles the professional development of their staff. 

I saw a ray of light when I was briefed a few years ago by someone high up the human resources function of the NNPC who wants to change the way young newly-recruited engineers in the corporation are accelerated through training and exposure to a position where they could assume professional and functional responsibilities earlier in the careers. While there is an in-built culture in the NNPC that may see such a plan self-destruct at the alter of an established system of political meddling, lack of an effective  mentoring system and reward for non-performance, as found in any state or federal ministry, this is hoping that it succeeds in spite of such odds.

If that plan is able to see the light of day, a structured continuing professional development  (CPD) process set up to work in tandem with a mentoring programme and delivered and monitored through the corporation’s existing and future projects will go along way in developing capable professionals that are able and empowered take decision’s on behalf of the corporation much early in their careers.

All one has to has to do is close one’s eyes and envision a corporation that ‘touches our lives in many other diverse ways’, as stated in its motto, is positioned to touch those lives more efficiently than it does now - from the point of exploration and to our tanks or gas burners. That, in effect, can only be achieved with a well-trained and empowered work force.

In the next part of this discussion I will attempt to highlight the shape a possible synergy between the NNPC and the various establishments directly mandated to spearhead the unleashing of such a potential. At the head of that value pyramid is, of course, the NNPC with various statutory organisations such as the Nigerian Content Division, the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), the Department of Petroleum Resources, the Energy Commission of Nigeria (ECN), etc., taking their respective positions as we travel down the pyramid. Some of these bodies are set up to have a synergistic and symbiotic relationship with the NNPC especially in the area of human capacity building, but apart from the Nigerian Content  Division almost all of them are working in a vacuum as far as the objective of job creation in the Nigerian oil and gas industry is concerned.


This article was original published in my column, 
'Oil and Gas Weekly' published in Government ,
 a publication of Leadership Newspapers, Nigeria 2012


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