With 86% Dominance, Nigeria Ramps Up Control of Oil Industry’s Top Management Positions

Although the country’s overall local content in the oil and gas industry still stands at about 43 per cent, Nigerians now occupy up to 86 per cent of top management positions of all the companies operating in the sector, a report by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), has indicated.

The figure is part of the result of the industry audit carried out by the transparency initiative in its most recent report, which intended to scope employment and gender distribution in the sector.

For years, Nigerians were spectators and were rarely part of the management cadre in the oil and gas industry, with almost every position occupied by expatriates.

However, the situation has improved markedly in the last decade or so, as local capacity development became a prominent issue in the country and Nigerians’ involvement in even the top management of the International Oil Companies (IOCs) increased.

But despite the fact that Nigeria still falls below par in local content participation, especially in the technical aspects of the sector, still having grown from just 3 per cent to about 43 per cent, the NEITI data stated in terms of management positions, the top, middle as well as the lower rung of the sector are now dominated by locals.

The completed templates returned by the companies to NEITI in the course of the survey further showed that for middle management, the number for Nigeria has also improved, hitting 91 per cent, while Nigerians in the lower cadre was 98 per cent.

“In terms of nationals employed in top management, 86 per cent were Nigerian nationals and in middle and lower, the figures were 91 per cent and 98 per cent respectively. The returned templates did not report any employees as being physically challenged,” the NEITI data stated.

In addition, industry-wide, NEITI stressed that there exist a total of 12,056 employees of which 82 per cent were male and 18 per cent female, stating that of this distribution, the percentage of top management was 5 per cent, middle management was 33 per cent and 62 per cent were lower-level staff.

Broken down further, of the top management in the oil and gas industry in the country, 78 per cent was male and 22 per cent was female, while in the middle and lower management, 82 per cent was male and 18 per cent was female.

According to the report, the addition of those statistics was prompted by the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Standard, which was introduced in 2019 and which involved the reporting of disaggregated employment by gender, company, and occupational level data for the extractive sector.

It added that the report sought

to present information on gender, occupational level, the locale of employees (indigenous to communities of operation, national or are expatriates), and information on physically challenged employees.

In the document, as earlier reported, NEITI recorded that total social expenditure was $896.891 million, with non-mandatory contribution of $81.297million (9.06 per cent) and mandatory contribution of $815.594 million (90.94 per cent).

In the same vein, the report reiterated that the mandatory contributions consisted of the Niger Delta Development Commission’s (NDDC’s) 3 per cent levy of $721.275 million and Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB’s) 1 per cent levy of $94.319 million.

For quasi-fiscal expenditure, which includes public social expenditure such as payments for social services, public infrastructure, fuel subsidies, outside of the national budgetary process, the report stated that

Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) expended N341.295 billion.

“The amount shows a reduction of 57 per cent (from 2018) in the amount spent by NNPC outside the budgetary process,” it said.