Engr. Obidike Nelkon Uzu is the CEO, Global Process & Pipeline Services Limited (GPPS), a leading process and pipeline service company in Nigeria, Incorporated in the year 2000 under the Companies and Allied Matters Acts of Nigeria and began full operations in 2010. Engr. Uzu has more than 26year’s oil field experience in drilling operation (Sedco Forex), production technology (SPDC) and Process and Pipeline Service (B.J Services) and has supervised many successful projects in Nigeria, America and the Uk. In an interview with Margaret Nongo-Okojokwu at the just concluded Nigerian Oil and Gas Opportunity Fair (NOGOF), Engr. Uzu speaks about the strength of collaboration as being the strongest factor behind his growing recognition and awards. Excerpts: Congratulations on your award at NOGOF. In recent times, we have seen you winning lots of awards and are often termed ‘most innovative indigenous company in Nigeria’, how have you been able to stay on top of your game in spite of our huge infrastructural gaps?
Honestly, we have achieved this feat as a team, it’s not just me, but Global Process and Pipeline Services Limited as a company, as the name suggests, we are a group of Nigerian experts that came together to start off this business and that way you can see the benefits of enormous collaboration among many people, which is what this local content drive is all about. It’s not about everybody setting up his own company; we can’t build capacity that way. Just because we collaborated, it has become easier for us to build capacity and grow during all these difficulties we all are seeing. The efficiency you are seeing today is as a result of the capacity and capability we have built to manage limited resources. Everywhere in the world, there are limited resources, so being able to manage and harness them is what is required. And that’s what has been working for us, that as of today we are not really indebted that much because we have been using our ingenuity, acquired while working for a lot of these multinationals, to grow our business. Which is what we are asking a lot of other Nigerian companies to do, not just pride themselves as a Nigerian company, saying ‘I am capable of doing this and that’, just do the work and do it very well, even better than any of your competitors, do it to meet international standards, and that’s when you’ll be patronized. That’s what we are doing today.
Last year December, you expanded your facility, what’s the drive for that? Was it in line with your capacity expansion agenda?
Yes. You know that facility was built to improve our infrastructure and the work environment, for instance, we bought some equipment at that time and to be able to keep them, we needed a workshop, a proper inventory for space, which is the reason for that expansion. It was built to be able to deliver more superior services to our clients, and that’s why we did it.
Has there been any improvement since the expansion?
Yes there has been enormous patronage from our clients and even some who just heard about us through the media at that time and try to source from us and luckily for us most of these new clients that came are now hooked up and we are doing newer projects and more projects with them, which wouldn’t have been; because ordinarily they didn’t know us. It was a kind of advertisement for us also and we got some mileage as a result.
What’s your take about the gas master plan and how best do you think the goals set by the government can be achieved?
Yeah, on the gas master plan, I have a different thinking because honestly, having been in this business for almost 28 years I realised that there is a missing link, and that link is transportation. We have about 40 trillion cubic feet of gas, fine, that’s inside the ground or the well head, we need so and so megawatts of power for homes and other industrial utilities that can use gas to power which is the market. From the well or the ground to the gas plant and transmitting this power to people’s homes is the missing link, that’s the potential and that’s what all Nigerians are craving for. So investing in infrastructure or pipeline, how do we get gas into Abuja so that every home in Abuja would have electricity, that is what we should be thinking about, that is the master plan that is very realistic and would be very impactful, so how do we get lights to industrial parks to power every home and drive the industrial revolution? That is the benefits of the gas master plan, I don’t believe in the euphoria of making nice statements to please everybody, until the basics are right, the results can’t be right.
Until we go back and say ‘on this value chain, what is missing? What do we need to do to tie it together? We need so and so amount of electricity. The gas plant in Afam is not operating more than 30% of its capacity there; meanwhile the people living in Port Harcourt don’t have light. The plant has already been propelled; meanwhile there is gas in obigbo. So we should be able to explain what the problem really is.
The market is there craving for gas, the gas is in Obigbo craving for buyers, the gas plant is also there craving for more gas to generate power and in the mist of all this, the situation is not being addressed properly because there is a huge bottle neck of government interference on the process, the pricing policy. The people producing the gas says ‘look the price is not attractive for us’, the gas plants says ‘we need more gas to generate more power’; every segment are giving excuses. So harmonise it and say what do we need to do so the guy who is producing would get a fair deal and the guys generating would get a fair deal as well? The same thing is happening in the power sector today, you realise there is a huge amount of money the DisCos or GenCos are not getting. Everybody consuming electricity in Nigeria needs to pay a fair price, some people are paying, and others are not and sometimes they over charge the guy who is actually paying, to pay for what he did not consume; so that’s the problem.
So it’s not necessarily a ‘willing buyer-willing seller’ thing?
No, it hasn’t gotten to that level where it being driven by market forces yet, it’s still at the regulatory stage, it’s not a market force driven concept yet.
Looking at the Nigerian content Act, now in its ninth year, what can you say about its implementation so far and how do you think we can improve?
Honestly, I am very impressed with the recent drive for local content, they are now invoking the Act as a law to the IOCs and all the players, that this is the rule and you must follow the rules and that is pushing everybody to abide by it. There has been bundles of excuses given in the past, like it can’t be done in Nigeria, there is no infrastructure and the likes, some of all these excuses were genuine, but a lot of them were propaganda to ensure we don’t get on our own. I have worked for multinationals for more than 20 years and I know the kind of perception they have of community workers. But the local content Act has made it mandatory that some portion of work can’t be given to companies from overseas again but someone from the community, so as to domicile that capability and that’s the way to sustainably grow local content. We need the local content Act to get a stronger monitoring as commissioned and in terms compliance, I think we should grow.
