The President of Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria has decried the large influx of expatriates, especially from India. It stated that this development was detrimental to the well-being and progress of indigenous professionals.
PENGASSAN President, Festus Osifo, while delivering his address during the association’s National Executive Council meeting yesterday, also said many qualified Nigerian were resultantly denied job opportunities.
According to him, the negative trend is contrary to the local content regulations that targets to increase local content participation to 70 per cent by 2027.
He said: “A pressing concern is the high number of expatriates in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, mainly from India. While skilled foreign workers contribute to economic development, the current situation demands attention.
“We have been calling names. We are not shying away from calling names. We called out a company called Indorama and others and the issue was fixed in the past.
“We are also holding to account a government institution called Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board and the Ministry of Interior, these are the people that give permits for these expatriates to come. If you go to some of these companies, vulcanizers and conductors are Indians. “Even operators are Indians.
And that should not go. So, rising from this NEC meeting, we are going to resolve that we will do everything possible to hold them to account.” He added: “This is not the first company where this has been done. In the company where I work, for example, Total Energy, in 2015, it was a battle.
It was war. We took it to them, and we ensured that the expatriate index was greatly reduced. “So, we have done it before. We can also do it again. Because the more you send these expatriates away, the more, the management of these companies will open up the system and employ more Nigerians.
It is so bad that our institutions are weak. “The people that fight for the workers in Angola are not even trade unions. They are government institutions. If you work in Angola for a while, you must go back to your country and reapply again.
And they ensure that the jobs that they give you in Angola are those technical jobs. So, our government must sit up. Our institutions must sit up.” Osifo also said the association was currently examining the tax reform bill.
He said: “We are currently examining the bill. So, one of the areas that we have seen in the bill that is quite okay is to give tax relief to people who are around minimum wage. What is there in the bill today is about N800,000 per annum.
“And also, for businesses whose turnover is about N50 million, we found that most of the nano and micro businesses fell within that range of N50 million.
So, it’s quite good. But, what we have been advocating is that that N800,000 is too small. The government should expand it to persons earning N100,000 to N150,000 per month. So, we are studying the bill, and we are looking at those provisions that are salient.”
