The Bank of Industry (BOI) in collaboration Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) have slashed interest rate on loans advanced to local companies in the oil and gas from 8 to 6 percent to cushion the effect of Covid-19 and boost local content development.
This is also as the NCDMB has released an additional $150 million to the $200 million Nigerian Content Intervention Fund that is being disbursed to local contractors, bringing the total amount $350 million.
A total of 31 projects have benefitted from the money within two years. Creating the Intervention Fund is part of the efforts by the government to enhance local content development capacity in the country.
Simeon Aranunu, an executive director at BOI who disclosed this, stated that the bank signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in 2017 in respect of disbursement of the fund to local contractors.
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The BOI chief who spoke at the 12th HSSE “Nigerian content development: Facing the future” forum, stated that the fund started with $200 million, adding that the conditions for accessing it, are that a company must be indigenous and a contributor to the fund.
He explained that in less than 18 months after signing the MOU with NCDMB, the bank disbursed the $200 million that was advanced to the fund to interested indigenous companies.
Giving a breakdown of the categories of the subsector that could benefit from the loan, he said a limit of $10 million was allocated for asset acquisition; manufacturing subsector in the oil and gas industry allocated $10 million; contract financing $5 million and community contractor financing has a limit of N20 million.
Also speaking at the occasion, Patrick Oboh, NCDMB’S director in charge of planning, research and statistics, stated that the plan of the agency was to be able to grow the Nigerian content to 70 percent by 2027.
“At the end of 2027 when we would have been able to achieve 70 percent local content if it is well implemented and the policy is sustained, the exercise would have been able to create over 300,000 direct jobs and retain about $14-20 billion annual income from oil and gas industry and, of course, Nigeria would be capitalising on shipyards to do some other jobs.
Total Exploration and Production Nigeria which was represented by Alex Agehedo, executive general manager for operation support service, said the company has started entering into a collaboration with NCDMB to renovate, equip and rebuild technical schools in Port Harcourt.
“We are going to rebuild the schools and provide them with technical materials and also expose their teachers to international educators.”
Nigeria needs people that can do plumbing, carpentry and other basic things that are missing in our society today. We must unlock this part of technical incompetence,” he added.
