To the Nigerian Youth: The Gulf of Guinea Beckons

To the Nigerian Youth: The Gulf of Guinea Beckons

By

Bello Salihu, PhD

One of the most disturbing realisations that ever hit me entered my mind as a slows preading, mind-numbing lament that settled in a small corner of my heart while I was on a business trip to the tiny mediterranean city-state of Malta in the penultimate year of last decade.

I arrived in Malta at a time when the major news item in the small island nation was how public resources, especially law-enforcement resources of the tiny nation, were being overwhelmed by modern-day boat people; mainly young Africans, of all genders, nationalities and age brackets who strayed into Malta on their way to look for a better life in Mainland Europe. From their various countries, they brave the unforgiven dangers of crossing the Sahara Desert to arrive in, then, Gaddafi’s Libya where unscrupulous local fixers arrange for them to be cramped into rickety boats in which to attempt to cross the Mediterranean sea into Europe. Their target destinations are normally any of the small Spanish or Italian islands dotting the Mediterranean sea from where they hope to be picked up by the coast guards of any of the target countries and be entered into the asylum system. They normally embark on their days of sea crossing equipped with nothing but bread, water and a two dollar compass as the only navigational aid.

Many that are unlucky stray or get into mid-sea distress and end up in tiny Malta. Many more that are unluckier still never make it to either mainland Europe or Malta at all but perish in the high sea. Malta, with a population of less than half a million people, found itself coping with a disproportionate number of illegal immigrants that needed to be housed, hospitalised, fed and, yes, even jailed. Their prison population spiked overnight.

That was when the realisation hit me that with all the resources and opportunities that abound in Africa, we are still haemorrhaging people! For nearly half a millennia Africans have been crossing the great waters that separate us from the rest of the world on journeys that were as perilous as those any human has ever endured. In the earlier instance, we were forced into those journeys as slaves to service that inhuman and shameful trade in human misery. In these latter days it is an adventure that is borne out of extreme hopelessness and dejection that is wilfully undertaken by our youth.

This column, however, is today throwing up the challenge to our youth to replicate what they achieved in entertainment and sports in the area of service delivery and innovation in the West African oil and gas industry. That if only they look a little harder, the opportunities they seek in Europe abound in Africa. All they need to do is prepare themselves to see and take those opportunities. All they will need from their government is help in preparing them to leverage the opportunities and enforceable policies in place to make it a bit easier for them to access these jobs especially in companies and projects taking place in their countries. This needs not be over-emphasised as all governments in the world do, or should do, this.

In the next few years, the West African oil and gas industry will generate nearly a million jobs worldwide through massive field developments that are going on in Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Gabon and the two Congos along with similar developments in the inland basins in Niger, Chad and the two Sudans . These projects will provide a massive jobs reservoir from which many young people in the region can draw successful careers and rewarding means of livelihood. If well managed, this has the capacity to do to the region what business process outsourcing (BPO) has done to the young people of the Indian subcontinent.

When exploring for hydrocarbons on the seismic lines, drilling for oil and gas onshore or offshore, the construction of offshore support structures and topsides or processing plants and refineries, the maintenance of these structures throughout their entire service life and the final abandonment of these structures and the reclamation of the land on which they stood, boots are required on the ground. These boots are normally young men and women in coveralls working to deliver the project. This, however, just scratches the surface because a many more people are required to support what these people do - from office admin staff to caterers to logistics experts - the list goes on and on. In west Africa some of these jobs are still, unnecessarily, undertaken by expatriates while many citizens are unemployed.

By using the tools of diplomacy such as bilateral trade agreements and technical support agreements, the Nigerian authorities will prove their mettle by selling Nigeria’s unparalleled advantage as a source of qualified and skilled labour to service the oil and gas developments in the Gulf of Guinea. They can do this by highlighting the factors have come together to put the the Nigerian youth at a unique position to take advantage of the opportunities available in the West African oil and gas industry.

These factors include the fact that English, being, not only the most widely spoken second language in the world, but also the language of the global oil and gas industry, is spoken at some level of fluency by all Nigerian graduates. In fact, Nigeria produces more graduates than almost all other West African countries put together and unlike most of the other graduates from those other countries that have to learn the language of the industry, Nigerians come equipped with that language.

Further to that, today’s generation accesses more information from the informal public domain than from structured learning in a classroom. The internet has democratised learning and access to information - which directly translates into access to skills and opportunities. Overwhelmingly the majority of the information on the internet today is in English.

This all dovetails into the fact that historically and culturally, Nigerians tend to be more itinerant and entrepreneurial than citizens of most other countries in Africa.

Another very important cornerstone for the realisation of this possibility is the objective of Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, which is hinged on the idea of free movement of people, goods and services throughout the region. Nigerians do not need a visa to enter or engage in legitimate employment in all the countries that make up the ECOWAS. Likewise, Nigerian service companies should have no impediment accessing contracts in other West African countries. If these impediments exist, the Nigerian government will do well to work on removing them.

Most of the major multinational oil and gas service companies operating in west Africa are also operating in Nigeria. For most people, entry into the industry is normally through the service companies. This is because of the project-based nature of their personnel demand which makes access to the jobs in these companies to be more fluid than in the international or national oil companies.

Incidentally, almost all the coastal nations that make up the ECOWAS are either oil producers or are currently engaged in active oil exploration. Even though Cameroon and Chad are not part of the ECOWAS family, because of their shared border with Nigeria, Nigerians do not require a visa to them. As for countries farther east such as Gabon, Angola, Sao Tome and Principe, the two Congos and even Namibia and South Africa, access can be negotiated as part of the various bilateral technical agreements we see being signed daily in the news.

To engage in, and be part of this evolving scene, the Nigerian youth will do well to broaden their knowledge of their region, be ready to travel widely within Africa and to also diversify their source of knowledge. Because the oil and gas industry generally looks at what one learns in the classroom as the starting and not the end point, those students who have endeavoured to widen their source of knowledge and information will soar above those who see obtaining a degree certificate as the be all and end all. This in itself, will help in checking the massive fraud that goes on in our educational institutions as students will wise up to the fact that while cheating may get you the grades, it is what you actually know that will get you the job and keep you in the job. After all, you can cheat your way to a degree and even blag your way past an interview - but from my experience in this industry - that will amount to nought if you cannot prove yourself on the job.

We must also encourage the Nigerian youth to learn a second international language. As a rule, Nigerian technical professional bodies such as the Nigerian Society of Engineers and similar organisations should make the adoption and fluency in another widely-spoken European language in Africa a pre-requisite for registration. Greater emphasis should be given to the French language. If the United Kingdom government is telling English kids whose mother tongue is the de facto lingua franca of the world to learn Chinese Mandarin because they understand the role China will take economically in this century and beyond, we will do well to tell our own young people to learn French because we are surrounded in West Africa by French speaking countries. Countries that are not only rising economically but also looking afar, normally to France, for technical know-how to exploit their resources. As Professor Ali Mazrui once noted, Nigeria’s major competition in West Africa is not any African country but France. There is nowhere that statement is truer than in the West African oil and gas industry.

At the lounge of my hotel I met and befriended two of these African boat people both of whom are from a West African country that has been recently in the news these last few years for hitting one of the most extensive oil finds in Africa. When I asked one of them why undertake such risk only to end up as unwanted illegal immigrants in Malta, his answer came in the form of a question. The question, asked in a voice laden with a mixture of regret and lament still plays in my mind; he simple asked “where are the opportunities back home?” He further told me that since he arrived in Malta he has learnt skills such as marble and stone masonry with which he works and gets paid by the hour in the Maltese construction industry. He does not earn much doing that but he earns enough for a decent life, albeit thousands of miles from where he calls home.

That the redemption and elevation of Nigeria and Africa largely rests on the shoulder of the youth is to repeat an oft-stated mantra. But then, a thousand similar mantras exist in Nigeria. Most have been repeated often enough to make them sound hollow and vacuous.

This was earlier published in my column 'Oil and Gas Weekly' in Government, 

a publication of Leadership Newspapers, Nigeria - 2012.