Hector Igbikiowubo
6 July 2009
interview
Lagos — ANITA Omoile just retired as Forster Wheeler's Vice President for Sub Saharan Africa and without leaving anything to chance, she has launched herself into another enterprise, Deep Blue Energy Services is a resource and solutions management company which is organising a training programme with the theme: Bribery and Corruption: Avoiding the Pitfall, sometime this month. In this interview Hector Igbikiowubo, Editor of Sweet Crude, she speaks on a wide range of issues including ongoing oil industry reforms, her stint in Forster Wheeler and her agenda for Deep Blue Energy.
Excerpts:
I understand that you started out at Forster Wheeler as a business development officer, then you became what?
I left Forster Wheeler as Vice-President for Sub-Saharan Africa.
A lot of people don't know what Foster wheeler is all about. To a lot of Nigerians it is just another foreign name. Can you tell us what exactly Forster Wheeler does?
You know one of the first things I did when I joined Forster Wheeler was to research on the company itself and to see how unique the organisation was. The company was started about 120 years ago. It's an American company. It currently has representations in more that 33 countries and in the UK right now, the company which is a subsidiary of Forster Wheeler International is one of the largest employers in Redding. It currently has 3,000 engineers working in it and the same thing goes when you go down to Milan, you have a huge office, in South Africa, in Singapore etc. In all of those places, this company has been able to establish a root and become local in most of these countries it is operating in.
For me, I felt if it can happen there, why not Nigeria so from the onset, it was as much as you can, try and see if more Nigerians can become part of this great company.
It is a world leader in engineering. It has two main and business lines - there is the power group and then the engineering and construction group.
It is a perfect engineering company basically. So we are looking at the services it provides that take care of the engineering construction, project management services for not only the oil and gas industry. In Nigeria, we are known for oil and gas but we are also looking at petrochemicals, the refineries, the pharmaceuticals etc. It is one of those companies that has the uniqueness in being able to provide the services that the market requires. Forster Wheeler has gone into bio-energy also.
In Nigeria, do you recall any notable jobs that Forster Wheeler may have carried out while you were there?
The LNG Train-7 project was a very unique one. Unique for me in the sense that a certain number of Nigerians participated in the project. Forster Wheeler was involved in other projects apart from that in Nigeria but I would rather not go into talking about the company except to say they were a great employer and lots of Nigerians actually got employed.
How many Nigerians work for Forster Wheeler at the moment?
It's interesting, I can't give you numbers but I'll tell you one of the things I started doing was do a search on how many Nigerian names were popping up and it was very interesting to see the numbers kept on going higher. There are a lot of Nigerians now working as experts in other countries, in Malaysia, some of them in South Africa. That for me, shows that given the right tools, Nigerians can survive and succeed in whatever they decide to do.
What of your experience in the industry, what have you come away with? Has the industry left you with any particular impressions you would like to share with us?
I think the industry could do with a lot of improvement. The industry could do with creating an enabling environment for investor confidence to grow. You need to also put the policies in place to ensure that operators and government accomplish whatever it is they started out to achieve.
One of the things also you learn in Nigeria (you know we are all learning), one of the things I've come to do research more about politics and things that are ongoing in Nigeria. It is not so much that we do not have the policies, it is not so much that we do not spend time creating the various commissions and stakeholders' forums, it is actually the implementation and the interpretation that I think in most cases have actually made us to not be where we should be.
Do you have any specifics or you would like to...?
I would not want to go into specifics. There is a lot of policies and bills. There is the local content, and we are talking about the oil industry reform bills now. I do think that there has to be another dialogue and we have to make sure that the country as a whole is protected and not personal interest, put on the table at certain stages of the bill. We need to collectively think of how to move the country forward to ensure policy implementation.
This country has such a number of very brilliant minds but they are very good at sitting down and coming up with policies and I think the point of disconnect is when it comes to implementation. I think in most cases, the penalties were never truly defined and in cases where they are defined, the populace cannot see them being enforced. It doesn't really create the kind of enabling environment for business to succeed and develop at the level we would all want it to.
Let us look at gas specifically.
We understand that government gave too much concession to the NLNG and because of its pioneer status it has enjoyed so much concession and this has not augured well for Nigerian content development. What is your take on that?
Well, I, personally, that is a personal view is that policy agreements are supposed to be entered into by representatives of the country as a whole and in sitting down and doing such negotiation, one should think longer-term and not short-term and so if during the period of the negotiation you have on behalf of the people reached an agreement, it should be respected.
I am talking about obeying the rule of law - an agreement has been reached and that agreement should be respected. Those are the things that basically show to the rest of the world that we are a nation they can do business with so I would say it is not so much as in whether or not the NLNG got the best of deals or did not get the best of deals, but what we should do is go back to when the policies surrounding these agreements were being put in place.
Did we really require the service? Did we make an agreement because we wanted to achieve a need? Was that need achieved? In moving forward, how do we now based on the knowledge we have, look at the current market where Nigeria currently stands, how strong are we to negotiate a better package? That's my take on it.
We understand that in the fashioning of the petroleum industry reform bill, some oil and gas exploration and production companies are complaining that they have not been carried along by Government in the formulation of the bill. What do you think the implications will be if the agreements entered into are not respected by the new laws?
My take really is that Nigeria is not an island. The world as we used to know it has changed to one that does not leave us isolated from how business is done elsewhere. For any economy to succeed, it needs to create an environment that allows for dialogue and for respect of all participants. If the operators or the investors believe that the policies do not give them the needed incentive to be able to partake in the industry as it is, then we should think longer-term on how this will impact the reputation of Nigeria on the global front. That's how I see it.
It is not so much as in this is what we've agreed, this is what must be. The stakeholders all need to be carried along, we are a democracy. We should learn to align ourselves with the rest of the world.
What recourse do the operators have in the event where the new laws fail to respect the sanctity of existing contracts?
We all look at Angola, we talk about how things are going well there. We see Ghana is coming up now. We should all put ourselves in the same shoes of the operators and the investors. They will do business where they feel have the necessary incentives to operate. Now, we may all say we don't need them. I think we should ask ourselves: "Is that true?" There is no harm in dialoguing and listening to every party's own view on how we can move forward. If the industry believes that we'll be losing billions of dollars if the reforms are carried the way they are, then we should bring in an expert to look at it. It is very important that we look at it, not as individuals but collectively as Nigeria, towards attaining the objective most beneficial for the country.
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