By Uthman Salami
The Director of Monitoring and Evaluation of Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Mr. Akintunde Adelana, has urged Nigerian lawyers to get on-board in participating in the oil and gas sector, describing their roles as “very key in the activities in the oil and gas.”
Akintunde stated this at a colloquium themed “NOGICD Act-Strides, Challenges And Opportunities” that was jointly organized by NCDMB in partnership with the Nigerian Bar association-Section of Business Law (NBA-SBL) in Lagos.
The Director while fielding questions from members of the press reiterated that the act establishing the board is “a legal instrument which is in the Nigerian oil and gas development act.”
He empathized that a legal instrument of NCDMB “requires creating rooms for lawyers in the country,” declaring that the sector “needs lawyers’ support in the interpretations and drive for compliance in the sector in terms of implementation of the provision of the Act.”
According to him, “lawyers play a very key role in the activities of the oil and gas industry by putting together contracts and interpreting most of the contracts because oil and gas is a global sector industry and there is are legal documents arising from business in several sectors in the world,” adding that the partnership with the NBA-SBL will help “these to thrive.”
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Bar Association-Section on Business Law (NBI-SBL) Chairman, Ayuli Jemide, believed the “Colloquium is to highlight that compliance is not the way it should be, on ways to make communication more transparent and how lawyers can whistleblow whenever they find out that firms and companies in the oil and gas sector are engaging law firms outside the country.”
Ayuli, while decrying lack of Nigerian legal practitioners’ contributions to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Statistics like other sectors are doing, said that, “If we can increase the pile in such a way that Nigerian legal practitioners will begin to get more works from the oil and gas space. And we can retain more of these works in-country, Nigerian legal practitioners will begin to prominently feature in the GDP Statistics of Nigeria.”
Mr. Ayuli added that NBA-SBL lagged behind when “legal practitioners in UK accounts for 1.5% of UK’s GDP and Nigerian Nollywood regularly features in the statistics Nigerian GDP.”
He urged his members for the need to move up in the value chain by tapping “into the Nigerian content intervention funds” as this will enable them to acquire requisite trainings and infrastructure to compete with other lawyers globally.
The chairman, however, expressed optimism that “more engagements and productive engagements” will empower the body to achieve all these feats.
He further disclosed that constant engagement with NCDMB would be a great success especially whenever they have challenges with some of the activities of the regulators in the industry.
On his part, the Director of legal services of NCDMB, Mohammed Babangida Umar, revealed that before, there were businessmen and service companies who would out-source Nigerian jobs for foreign experts to do.
But that things are beginning to change as they have “insist jobs should be done in Nigeria, by Nigerians, using Nigerian goods or Nigerian services.”
He added that the colloquium with the NBA-SBL is a “stakeholders mechanism towards bringing out the issues that the board is doing and the activities of the board” as well as educating people about other activities of the board
He also affirmed the board’s readiness to use the “big stick” on a any company that defies to comply to any of the provisions of the act.
He enjoined Nigerian lawyers to “buy into and seek to understand what the NCDMB are doing” as there are many opportunities for them to benefit from the activities of the NCDMB.