“Our biggest success with the Egina Project was proving to the world that Nigerians are capable”

Amy Jadesimi is the CEO of LADOL, a $500 million Industrial Free Zone in Lagos. A commissioner for business and sustainable development commission, she has an MBA from Stanford University, an MA (OXON) and BMBCh from Oxford University. A trained medical doctor from Oxford University, Amy moved from medicine and got financial training at Goldman Sachs and Stanford Graduate School of Business. She was voted the Young CEO of the Year earlier this year by the African Leadership Forum, an Archbishop Tutu Fellow working to reduce maternal mortality. She is also a Young Global Leader (WEF), Rising Talent (Women’s Forum for Economy and Society), 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa (Forbes), a Top 25 Africans to Watch (Financial Times) and was named as one of 2018’s Most Influential People of African Descent (Under 40) Worldwide, in support of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (UN IDPAD). Also named as one of 50 Influential Women in Business by The Africa Report, Jeune Afrique and the Africa CEO Forum, she is a member, Advisory Board of Prince’s Trust International and contributor to Forbes. 
In this interview with Majorwaves Energy Report Editor, Margaret Nongo-Okojokwu; Dr Amy who is overseeing the growth of West Africa’s largest logistics and engineering facility operating in a free trade zone, speaks about how LADOL is utilizing the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development (NOGICT) Act, expanding services to sectors outside the oil industry and creating tens of thousands of jobs. Exceprts.

Congratulations on being honoured with the FIN award as the leading woman in Oil and Gas in Nigeria. We would like to know what this award means to you as a female CEO in this country; has it helped to change your view about how women are perceived in the Industry?

The FIN award was a great honour, I am very humbled that they gave me that award; it’s a really great honour. The reason I was able to win the award is because LADOL is a place where we believe in team work so I didn’t really just accept the award for myself,

I accepted it for the whole LADOL team, because everything LADOL has achieved, has been achieved through the staff and management many of whom have been with us for over a decade. Now for specifically speaking about women in the Industry, it’s tough, you have to overcome a lot of negative perceptions, I think overtime things are improving and the reason they are improving is because women have proven themselves capable at all levels, but what we have to do now is encourage structural change meaning for women to have true equality and parity with men, we have to make it easier for women to have children and come back into the office, we have to make it more acceptable for a man to take paternity leave, we have to make it possible for per-time working at home. We have women who work per-time, we have women who go on maternity leave, and they are very effective employees. So we have to look at making structural changes within major organizations to enable women to participate in the work place and to enable men to fully participate in the home place.
Fantastic! On the part of your recently acquired ISO certifications; we’ve seen that LADOL has gained certifications on three levels now, ISO 45,001 ISO 9001 and ISO 14,001.
Again, the LADOL team really engaged and rose to the challenge forgetting our international certifications, we got ISO 9001 for the first time last year, we were the first company in north and west Africa to get ISO 45,001 and I want Nigerians to really pause and think about that; that a 100% indigenous Nigerian company is the first company to get that award, it really shows that Nigerian companies are going places and part of the reasons we highlighted is to help change the negative perceptions people have out there about Nigerian companies. Nigerian companies will soon be exceeding international standards and LADOL wants to be part of that. The reason we were able to achieve these standards is all about the team, you cannot get these standards unless you have everybody in the company from the bottom to the top fully aware. We also run a fairly flat structure where we encourage participation, criticism, stop work, everything at all level, so no matter who you are, we want you to feel empowered when you are working at LADOL and that’s how we achieve excellent standards and also it’s important to embrace local content. People talk about local content often because it’s a requirement, a legal and necessary requirement but its more than that, local content is actually the key to business success and we also want to highlight the fact that we were only able to get these certifications because we have a high number of trained Nigerian staff who are working with us, who have been with us for years and who will continue with us, and that local content is what distinguishes us and gives us competitive edge not just in Nigeria, but in the whole of West Africa.

How has that affected your business, I mean these certifications; has it changed anything so far?

Well, the certification is an outcome of changes that we have already been making in the business over the past decade. LADOL has always been focused on making sure that we run an operationally efficient, transparent and compliant organization and that is because from inception our chairman and founder realized that we needed to have these processes in place in order to be successful. I always tell people that the really successful people are actually like me, very geeky. You spend a lot of time in your office, you spend a lot of time doing paper work, being successful at business involves embracing the mundane, what I mean by that is you have to really amass yourself amidst policies and procedures, you have to look at the detail of work instructions, how things are done, why they are done in a certain way and that is the key to success. So from inception that’s the kind of company we were; and it also means that we were able to scale up very quickly, because once you have a foundation, there is space in having the correct procedures in place you could scale up and add people and all facilities, and add infrastructure very quickly without affecting the quality of the work that you are producing.

So are we expecting to see LADOL get listed on the London stock exchange or any stock exchange any time soon?

We are planning to list, that is not in the near term, we are looking at that more as a medium term, maybe in the next two to three years, but we always had this thing as one of the things that we were going to do when the company reaches the right stage.
Looking at Local Content in Nigeria, we are aware that LADOL is one of the companies that have benefitted in the application and implementation of the NOGICT Act, Now in its ninth year, what do you think about the Act, are there areas that you think should be improved upon, are there things that you think the board should know and do something about?
I think that the Local Content Act has already changed the landscape for the oil and gas industry and its had such a positive impact, one of the first things we need to look at is how to spread that beyond the Petroleum sector to other sectors, to the manufacturing sector, the technology sector, the fine art sector. So the benefits of local content when it’s properly applied and strictly enforced, to the economy are second to none. In other words having correct local content could push our economy into the G-20 just as it did for Brazil. As we sit here today, year on year we’ve seen the NCDMB, (the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board) improve and increase the standard so when we started the EGINA there was nowhere in Nigeria where you could do integration and fabrication because of the local content Board mandating that such a facility be built and including it in Total’s contract, we now have that capacity, and having that capacity in LADOL makes Nigeria the Hub for the whole of West Africa for integration and that gives us the highest lifting capacity in the whole of Africa and all of that has come from local content. And what’s the benefit to Nigeria? The benefit to Nigeria would be the creation of fifty thousand jobs and billions of dollars of new investments coming into the country, a lot of that investment will be by private indigenous Nigerians, but on the back of that private indigenous Nigerian investment, we will now see international investments and most importantly we will see more domestication or not just petroleum sector projects but works projects, railway projects, textile projects, agricultural projects. More and more of these industrial activities can now be done here, thanks to the facilities and infrastructure built through the local content Act.

That’s when it’s linked to other industries right?

Well, it’s already there. So for example the yard that we have in LADOL can already be used for other industries so we can build for the railway sector today using the infrastructure that we built for EGINA.

So as one who benefited and participated in the EGINA project, what do you think is the impact of local content on deep water operations in Nigeria?

When the Vice president visited LADOL last year, the Managing Director of Shell spoke and he explained the importance of the enabling environment that the government has put in place, having an enabling playing field and anti-monopoly policies in place, he explained the benefits that shell will be getting from operating as with LADOL and in a nutshell he said they will get 40% cost savings by operating out of LADOL and those cost savings come from the enabling environment which included our lowing and monopoly which allowed LADOL to participate in the market on the one hand and on the other hand, it comes from the almost two decades investments that is almost 20 years of investments that LADOL has made, building a facility, acquiring equipments and training a Nigerian team that can work 24/7 and by having that high level of local content in a highly specialized deep offshore logistics space, we are able to halve the cost for deep offshore production and exploration support. By halving the cost, you are doubling the return, so you are now making Nigeria competitive with Brazil and with other parts of the world and you are attracting more investment and on the back of the cost savings that shell gets from operation out of LADOL, they now have approval to go ahead with the BONGA South West project which will be approximately 10 Billion dollars of investment. So local content leads to cost savings,
leads to investment, leads to more job creation, leads to more cost savings, so you create a venturous circle and that’s how you now have an exponential impact on the country’s GDP and you can see a country like Nigeria. Honestly if we continue the way we’re going now, within the next ten years we could be entering the G20, we just have to stay the course, we have to make sure that projects that can be done in Nigeria are done in Nigeria, and we have to build year on year on investments that we’ve made, that’s very important.

Brilliant! So what are the innovations on going right now in LADOL, would you say LADOL stands out as one of the most preferred destination for deep offshore logistics at the moment?

I think for deep offshore logistics support, LADOL is the only official deep offshore logistics base in West Africa I believe. The reason we’ve been able to do that is because of the massive upfront investment we’ve made in infrastructure, facilities and people. In terms of innovation, we are now heavily focused on sustainability, so we are leveraging our relationships in the petroleum sector to diversify into other sectors and to make all our clients operate sustainably. So sustainably means local employment, it means clean technology, it means supporting gender equality. There is a wide range of sustainability matrix that we measure ourselves against and these are all tied into the United Nations sustainable Development Goals. So LADOL has been able to be successful, because we are indigenous Nigerians, because we believe in high levels of local content, because we believe in long term investment into our own infrastructure, into our facilities, into our own people and what we want to do now is to show other people that success so that more investments can come and more LADOLs can be developed and ultimately, LADOL will be a blue print for sustainable industrialization across Africa.

Still in the spirit of sustainability, recently you have been involved in a lot of development work, you are an Ambassador for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how are you replicating these Goals in LADOL and how do they reflect on your host communities around you?

So for us, all of our internal management systems are based around specific targets and goals and those targets and goals are formed around our vision and mission. Our vision and mission in summary is to build a sustainable industrial free zone and to replicate that concept across Africa, to sustainably industrialize Africa. And depending on which department and which project we are working on, that will be reflected in different ways; from the planning to the execution stage of every activity in LADOL, sustainability is at its core. Within the free zone, we also are putting together a pledge, so that all of the tenants and clients within the zone will also sign up to that pledge. As we develop the zone, we are bringing in a cleaner technology solutions for how we manage water, waste and power. So Going from LNG to Solar, we’re using as much as water and waste as possible and using waste energy solutions. So if you are a tenant in LADOL, you will automatically be part of a sustainable environment, but we want you to sign the pledge so that your own operations within whatever field you’re specialized in within the free zone are also as sustainable as possible, that’s something you will improve year on year, and finally both for ourselves and the community, training is paramount, so our upstream academy will be opening later this year providing training for our own staff is something which is engrained in everything we do, a lot of what we do at LADOL has never been done in Nigeria before so obviously a lot of training is required. But also training and sensitization of our surrounding, of ourselves, and our extended families and our community, in terms of sustainability for their environment, for their families for their homes, it’s also very useful, and these are things which yield a positive return not just for the communities, the people we’re investing in but for ourselves as well because sustainability always creates the venturous circle where people end up benefiting from it. It creates a win win-win if you like.

That’s true. So coming to EGINA; what is the most fascinating bit of your accomplishment of this project, and what part of it was of immense concern to you until you surpassed it?

I think the biggest concern we had was whether or not the FPSO would come because that was outside our control, but in the end, I am pleased to say Total really stood up for Nigeria and insisted that the FPSO must come to LADOL and that it must be integrated in Nigeria, so that was really the toughest part of the project; and now that that has happened, Total will go down in history as the Oil company that changed the direction of Local Content and gave us a leg up, unto a level of Local Content that can now lead us to joining the G20, because now that we have proven that the FPSO can be birth, it opens up a whole new world for fabrication that can be done locally, engineering that can be done locally, we should try more investment into fabrication in the country, and that’s something that we’ve tried to explain to people; when we talk about creating 50,000 jobs, 45,000 of those jobs would be outside LADOL. So what we want to do at LADOL is be the aggregator, but we need something to aggregate. So across the country, there were four other facilities that were upgraded as a result of Egina, they upgraded five facilities plus LADOL. Those other facilities also need to be fully utilized and the facilities in the country need to be fully utilized. And since we now know that any piece of fabrication you do in Nigeria, will be integrated in Nigeria, as in it will no longer be taken to the other side of the world but will stay in Nigeria, it creates a huge economic incentive to maximise how much we do in Nigeria. So we are going from an era Pre-Egina where people will be maximizing the level of fabrication they do locally to a post-Egina era, people are maximizing the level of fabrication and engineering they do because they know it can be integrated in LADOL.
In terms of the biggest success, I think the biggest success was proving to the world how talented Nigerians are, talking about Nigerian engineers, welders, as well as Nigerian HSE staff. In other words, the way in which the local staff working in the yard in LADOL stepped up was above international standards; the expectations at the beginning were low, the main contractor at the beginning of the job initially brought their country nationals but NCDMB stepped in and said they didn’t need third country nationals, and when they eventually replaced them with Nigerians, the Nigerians exceeded international standards. So that’s really important because having the facility is really half the battle, we also need to have Nigerians who can do the work. So we’ve proven that not only do we have the facility where you can do the work physically, that you can as well bring the largest project in Nigeria; we’ve already proven that Nigerian staff can also improve the quality of the standards in terms of the quality of their work, which is so important and it’s something am so proud of.

What are you doing with your upgraded facilities at the moment? We’ve heard of how other contractors laid off a huge number of staff as a result of lack of wok after the Egina project. Are you also taking that route?

What we’re actually doing right now is studying all the staff that worked on Egina to see who we can bring on board as permanent staff. We are also in discussions with all the potential clients so we can start to build up another group of work. Because you’re absolutely right, what we need is consistent work so that we can keep Nigerians perpetually employed, and that’s exactly what we’re talking to the government about as well. That since such facilities over time have been upgraded, we have to make sure that these facilities have long term contracts in place. That would mean that the government gets a Return from upgrading these facilities, and that would mean that you have perpetual employment for Nigerians and it will lower the cost of doing business in Nigeria, which increases the attractiveness of Nigeria as an area for investment, project execution which brings in more investments, lowers the cost, creates more employment, and we go on like that. So it’s important that upgraded facilities be used and we on our side are making sure we have our people in place, standards in place and are already in discussion with clients and putting several contracts in place to keep the Nigerians perpetually employed.

Now that Egina has come and gone, what other investments do you have or are expecting to have on your facility?

Well we know that Bonga South-West is coming, the tender for Bonga South-west is already out, so I think everybody is looking forward to that. At the same time, we are also looking at a range of other projects. As I said, this isn’t an oil and gas facility, this is an industrial facility. So we are also talking to Agricultural companies, we’re talking to car manufacturers, we’re talking to people who do general works to see if we can also use the facility for them.

“I think that the Local Content Act has already changed the landscape for the oil and gas industry and its had such a positive impact, one of the first things we need to look at is how to spread that beyond the Petroleum sector to other sectors”