At The Nigeria Oil and Gas Conference/Exhibition

Sorry about the silence in the last two or so weeks. I had to attend the Nigeria Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition and boy, was it an eye-opener!

What really impacted me was not the conference or even the exhibition proper, but was rather the cross-fertilisation of ideas that took place between different players in different areas of the Nigerian Oil and Gas business. We really took time to share our dreams, achievements and of course, gripe about our various jobs, you know, the usual stuff about things moving too slowly (especially the promotions!), office politics bla bla bla.

On the whole, I came away from the event very pained that my dear country Nigeria has not moved from the level of collecting rent from the oil and gas business in Nigeria to actually taking an active part in the business. Heck, we’ve been an oil-producing nation for over forty years! Yet we can’t manage the oil business by ourselves. Our various governments have been so busy chasing their share of the petro-dollars that they have never seriously considered the need for Nigeria and Nigerians to dominate that industry by now, or at least, play a much larger role in it than it presently does. When countries like Brazil’s PetroBras can come to Nigeria to seek for business, I see no reason why our NNPC or NPDC shouldn’t be drilling for oil both within and outside Nigeria by now.

Anyway, the event was very well planned. As for the photo above, I'm the second to last ugly guy from the left side. We look pretty smug, don't we?