Nigeria must rethink its Human Capacity Development strategy and prepare its skilled workforce for increasing domestic roles as the country struggles to retain the technical manpower required to deepen Nigerian Content in the petroleum industry.

Director-General of the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Dr. Afeez Oluwatoyin Ogun, who delivered remarks at the OGTAN Human Capacity Development Conference and Expo in Warri, Delta State, pointed at a growing paradox of depleting industry skills at a time of expected uptick in investments in the sector.

Ad >>>

He noted that while Nigeria needs more technically competent workers to support new investments, some of the people already trained under Nigerian Content programmes are leaving the country in search of better opportunities abroad.

Ogun said competence must be measured by the ability to perform a job rather than possession of a certificate, warning that skilled labour naturally gravitates toward environments where its capabilities are better rewarded and appreciated.

He specifically raised concerns over trained personnel leaving Nigeria, noting that many NCDMB-trained workers were emigrating, while the industry was simultaneously struggling to find digital oilfield specialists, cybersecurity professionals and people capable of managing complex projects.

Against this backdrop, Ogun argued that Nigerian Content should increasingly be conceived in regional rather than narrowly national terms.

With the African Continental Free Trade Area facilitating greater movement of people, capital and skills, he said Nigeria could no longer realistically confine skilled Nigerians within its borders. He therefore called for a shift from “local content” to “regional content”, arguing that Nigerian skills and capital are already moving across African markets.

The argument introduces a new dimension to Nigeria’s Nigerian Content policy. Rather than measuring success only by how many Nigerians are employed in domestic petroleum operations, the country’s human capital strategy could also be judged by its ability to produce internationally competitive Nigerian professionals capable of exporting competence across Africa.

Ogun called for greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and apprenticeship, citing the Mercedes-Benz apprenticeship model as an example of how skilled graduates could be given structured pathways into sustainable careers. He also challenged the traditional preference for white-collar employment, arguing that highly skilled technical work should be recognised as an equally viable route to economic success.

He said Nigerians were already working in about 14 African countries and argued that Nigerian competence tends to follow Nigerian capital wherever it expands. In his view, investment in skills therefore creates more than workers; it creates the human foundation for new industries and economic opportunities.

The academic community at the conference reinforced the argument from a different perspective.

Professor Mike Onyekonwu, pioneer founding chairman of OGTAN and founder and managing consultant of Laser Engineering and Resources Consultants Limited, said Nigerian graduates possess the intellectual capacity required by the industry and that there is little justification for importing experienced foreign engineers when much of the necessary talent is already being produced by Nigerian universities.

The problem, he argued, is inadequate exposure to quality systems, digital skills and commercial thinking. Drawing on his 42 years of industry experience and his work with graduates, he called for fundamental changes in how Nigerian universities prepare engineers and other professionals for industry.

Onyekonwu proposed that universities should deploy more digital resources and aim to produce graduates who are genuinely job-ready, while calling for better funding of university projects and improvements to Industrial Training programmes. He also criticised the inadequate supervision of students during industrial attachments and called for greater access to industry data for university research.

He further advocated a deliberate “train the trainers” programme to continually update university lecturers as industry skills evolve, arguing that government must share responsibility for upgrading the capacity of academic staff.

Both speakers therefore placed the Nigerian Content debate beyond the traditional question of local employment quotas. Their interventions pointed to a more ambitious objective: building Nigerians who are sufficiently competent to compete not only for projects in Nigeria but across Africa and the global petroleum and energy industry.

That challenge is becoming more urgent as Nigeria enters another potential investment cycle. The NCDMB has warned that the country lost nearly 15 years of investment and that a generation of graduates consequently missed adequate industry training. With new projects now emerging, the country must simultaneously rebuild its domestic skills pipeline and prevent the loss of existing competence through migration.

The Warri conference thus exposed an important evolution in Nigerian Content policy: the objective can no longer be simply to keep skilled Nigerians within Nigeria. It must be to build a workforce so competent, adaptable and entrepreneurial that Nigerian Content becomes a competitive export of expertise across Africa and beyond.