The Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), has continued to improve the fortunes of the oil and gas sector by contributing to the development of Nigerian expertise. In an exclusive interview with our team of editors, the Executive Secretary of the agency, Engineer Muttaqha Rabe Darma outlines how the fund is expanding its home-grown avenues for developing talents for the nation’s oil and gas industry. Excerpts.
What has been PTDF’s major achievements so far since you assumed office as Executive Secretary?
Its been three years and three months since I assumed this position and since then we have recorded lots of achievements and principally, we have been able to achieve 3 times what the Fund achieved in 8 years, in terms of everything, whether on programmes or scholarships award, discipline, new programmes design and also on research and project .
The mandate of the PTDF is to develop the petroleum technology, as the name implies, so first of all, understanding petroleum technology is very essential towards attainment of the mandate. Petroleum Technology means science and engineering of petroleum resources, that is science and engineering of hydrocarbon and it is hydrocarbon that translates into petroleum resources.
So, if you are to develop science and engineering of petroleum resources you have to understand what petroleum resources are and what the industry is all about. The industry is so complex and this complexity arises from the fact that it is hi-tech, it is capital-intensive and also dynamic; dynamic because of the intricacies of the industry itself.
Today, the industry keeps changing, and because of that we, the people within the industry need to change to catch up with the changes in the system. For Nigerians to work in the industry, they have to be skillful enough; they must have the necessary qualifications, they must be competent enough to work in the industry, but there must also be the necessary infrastructure to always catch up with the changes within the industry. The industry changes every second, because of so many things that are happening in the industry as the industry captures the attention of the world.
What is the current position of PTDF with regard to its training programmes, especially the popular Overseas Scholarship Scheme (OSS)?
Human capital development is our first priority in PTDF. That is why you see us giving scholarship; that is why you see us developing trainings that are pertinent to the activities of the oil and gas industry, like welding, fabrication and other skills for the low cadre in the oil and gas industry. But then we said, If you keep on training people overseas to the best institutions in the world which are here in Nigeria, it means , the more you have people, the more you take them overseas to train them.
Now, the question is: would you continue to have resources to take these people to the United States, UK or other European countries to train? Obviously, the answer is no, so, because of that we now provide a means of institutional upgrade and institutional development that will pave way for human capital development for the oil and gas industry.
As at now, we have upgraded 26 Nigerian universities, that is 26 different departments in 26 Nigerian universities all across the 6 geo-political zones. And we have started the development from the scratch; some institutions, like the first oil and gas Polytechnic that I know of in the entire Africa and the Middle East, it is about 65 % completed now in Bayelsa state.
We now have another institution that I know of the only one existing in the entire world, a Polytechnic for gas technology and environmental sciences; we have a similar institution in Canada but it is not called Polytechnic, I think they call it technical institution but it gives diplomas just like the Polytechnics we have here. This Polytechnic we have here is in Bonny, there are only two similar Polytechnics in the entire world.
We have also started skills development and training centers for the oil and gas. The first after a similar center, which is in Nuremberg, Germany, owned by the United Nation. That is the center I know of which we are modeling the one in Port Harcourt after. It is a center that, even if you don’t have any formal education at all and you think you have some skill that you want to develop and make it useful, come to the center. We will evaluate your skill and then put you through formal training that will qualify you as competent personnel with certification by the United Nations (UN) to pursue that trade.
Is that applicable to only the Petroleum industry?
Yes, only with regards to the petroleum sector. In fact, as far as I am concerned there is nothing that cannot be linked to the oil and gas. That is why in PTDF, we categorize oil and gas training, in terms of core oil and gas courses and then supporting oil and gas courses. If we are taking 90 people for core oil and gas training, we also recognize that there are 10 people we must take to support oil and gas training; for instance in scholarship, if you are awarding 100 people scholarship, then we expect 90 should be science and engineering, while 10 should be in the oil and gas finance because an engineer will not be the same person to do the finance the books.
Thirdly, we also support systems and institutions to see to the advancement of the oil and gas industry. These are already established systems that are either professionally established or systems that are there to ensure that even if you do belong to a different profession you are in the same vocation; NUPENG for instance, you could have drivers, machinist, people in different categories but they come together as NUPENG. PTDF also collaborate with these people and support them.
The fourth thing we do is that, we also help in the development of some of the oil and gas materials and manufacturing processes. Either in the form of research and development or in the form of the actual business development or anything that has to do with the oil and gas industry.
Apparently, there are few schools helping to develop but they are not enough to cater for the large number of applicants who want to work in the petroleum industry. Is it not too hasty to put a ban on the overseas training while the education sector has not been fully developed?
I was a member of Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), so I know that some of the demands ASUU make all the time is that there is inadequate funding of the universities which include funding of research, funding of infrastructures developing the universities and human capital development of the university.
Presently, we have 26 departments in 26 universities that we have already upgraded. In the process of upgrade, we take a department and look at it holistically, from the angle of infrastructure, that is: are they up-to-date, do they support teaching and research, and do they support learning and scholarship? If they don’t, then we link up with the university, that is the members of the faculty and the technical staff of the department to ensure there is adequate infrastructure development to support teaching - learning research and human capital development in the department.
In all the universities, we develop their entire departments from scratch, by providing classrooms for lectures, seminar rooms, high degree laboratories for research , workshops if need be, providing staff rooms and segregation between the senior and junior lecturers, we also provide all the equipments that the department need.
Again, we link up the department virtually with any department of its choice in any university in the advanced world. We pay the yearly subscription so that the department will be able to access research materials in Nigeria from universities in the United States or United Kingdom.
Most importantly, we also upgrade the skills of the lecturers because we try to ensure that we provide these universities with what will make them to be at par with those universities we take our scholars to outside Nigeria. The only other thing we cannot provide is to stop the lecturers from going on strike. (General laughter)
If these universities are provided with all these required materials, why should we be taking Nigerians to the United States? So, it will even be better to give Nigerians scholarship to these universities so that the process of the scholarship is adding value to the funding of the universities that the Federal Government is doing.
When I first came here, there were 3,000 people who applied for PTDF scholarship but 1,200 were qualified to sit for the examination and I remember very well in the North West zone, there were only 54 candidates who sat for the exams, in seven states. But last session, 11,000 people applied for the scholarship, and out of these people, we have close to 6,000 that qualified to sit for the exam. So you can see that if the number continues to grow, you wont have enough resources to give these people scholarship to go outside the country.
Again, if you do a statistical analysis of the descriptive distribution of the data, out of the 1,200 people, 300 were given scholarship, that is more than 30%. Now, 7,000 people sat for the exams, 500 were given scholarship, that is five per cent. So, the more they grow in number, the more it becomes difficult for you to provide scholarship for.
There have been complaint from prospective scholarship beneficiaries that Satellite and Communications engineering course is not among PTDF’s approved list of MSc courses. What is the true situation?
No, maybe for this year. You see, our scholarships are done based on the demands of the industry. We normally do a survey every two years, the last one I think was in 2011. The survey looks at the existing gaps in the industry that have not been filled; secondly, it looks at vacancies that had been occupied by non-Nigerians and we train people so that they can come back and take over. Thirdly, we look at the on-coming job requirements, if there are new fields that will come on board. The next survey will be in 2013.
As a technical assistant and consultant to the committee of the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), what specific processes have PTDF put in place to ensure transparency in the industry and what role can you the play in this initiative?
Yes. I will want to say that we comply with all the requirements of transparency and financial regulations in the industry; we also comply with all the requirements of regulatory authorities holding the economy, which are all guidelines and policies that you comply with to be transparent in whatever form. We also institute in-house policies to make whatever we are doing in PTDF transparent. Of course I can’t say we are perfect but people should understand that the PTDF Nigerians knew in the past is no longer the same. This is a reformed PTDF that will try as much to comply with all rules as well as institute internal controls you hardly find anywhere.
The upgrading of the Petroleum Training Institutes (PTIs) is one of the priorities of the PTDF. What is the stage of the upgrade of the institutes in Delta and Kaduna states and what plans do you have for infrastructural development in the years ahead?
The two Petroleum institues (PTIs) are two different things altogether, with the one in Delta meant to cater for middle and some senior management , while the one in Kaduna is meant for those that have attained the general manager level The one in Delta has been completed 100 per cent, but the only thing is that we need to commission it, and we are looking at the second quarter of the year, that is after some of the equipments that we have purchased are installed and tested and we are sure that they’re working. The Kaduna center is about 68 per cent completed.
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