Dr. Ibilola Amao is the Principal Consultant, Lonadek Global Services. In this interview with Funmi Ogundare, she explained why the country must equip the youths and ensure that the right human capital asset are employed in the energy, oil and gas industry so that they can create the needed value to secure the future of Nigeria
Over the years, you have been able to empower thousands of youths in the area of Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), how has Lonadek being able to use this feat to close the energy gap across the continent?
In 2005, we were engaged by a company to recruit some engineers and we realised that the skills and the type of capabilities they needed ,were not available locally. So we realised that there is a need to have human capital development initiative to bridge the gap between our universities and what the industry required. Apart from training and upskiling graduates, we also needed to look at the curriculum and mode of training, learning and development in our universities and secondary schools to make sure that the kind of graduates being shunned out from our institutions of higher learning, were competitive enough and could compere with graduates from other developed nations . We had two problems, one was to get graduates who could think critically, abstract and logically outside the box and the other was to be able to overcome biases in the energy, oil and gas industry. We realised that that was lacking because people were learning in universities , both the students and lecturers have never gone to the field to actually see how the refineries work. They had not been offshore , they didn’t even know what the technology in the energy sector was all about . They had learnt the theory, but they had never seen or touched the field to know what the industry required. For any country to move forward, there must be a deliberate effort to ensure that the best brains are in the teaching, learning, research and development area. Iron sharpens iron, if you put your best into your education, you will get the best out of the next generation. In order to address the immediate needs at that time, we started by developing and engaging the best talent in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths because the energy industry is STEM- driven to deliver oil and gas in deep water. You need the best brains using the best software and state of the arts technological equipment. We realised that we had to create an awareness so we decided to go on a 15-year advocacy initiative; Vision 2020 Youth Empowerment and Restoration initiative which we started in May 2006. The reason why those engineers did not perform well when they were being interviewed by expatriates from Port Harcourt, Milan and Paris, was because they lacked analytical, logical and out-of the box thinking skills . They can repeat what is in the textbook accurately and tell you what they have been told, but they could not think out of the box and and answer you accurately because they had not been taught the fundamentals. So we felt if we get secondary school students to know that the industry where there is a lot of work in Nigeria requires a lot of technology, the best brains , intellectual capacity and continuous learning ability to critically think out of the box, then we can get them excited early enough so that the most intelligent and brilliant ones come into the oil and gas industry. In so doing , we were securing the future of Nigeria and sustaining the oil and gas industry. If 95 per cent of the budget of Nigeria comes from the oil and gas industry, then it is an energy security risk if we cannot have Nigerians sustain the industry. For instance, now that there is Covid and the expatriates have returned to their countries, if we didn’t have Nigerians to run the oil and gas industry, we may be in trouble. So every country must plan for its future and must look at the frontiers sectors and make sure that they have the right human capital asset to work the sectors and create maximum value there. We finshed the project by December 2020.