Chronic Shortage of Technical Manpower Threatens Power Reforms

By Chineme Okafor in Abuja

The federal government has said the cumulative effects of lack of structured technical training and recruitment of technical personnel into Nigeria’s electricity sector in the last couple of years is now taking a huge toll on the sector.
It said the development now constitutes a big threat to its ongoing reforms in the power sector, considering the lack of adequate and quality technical personnel in the sector.
The government noted that upon its privatisation of successor companies of defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) it handed over to the private sector a porous technical workforce which now needs to be replaced for the sector to thrive further.
While expressing its worries at the increasing number of expatriate technical workers in the power sector, the government also said expatriate technical worker were already taking over jobs that ordinarily should be done by Nigerians if adequate technical training were not stopped in PHCN.

To this end, the Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, said recently in Abuja that the National Power Sector Apprenticeship Scheme (NAPSAS) which was launched at the presidential villa by President Goodluck Jonathan, is meant to address the lingering gap in technical personnel within the sector.

He equally said through NAPSAS, young Nigerians will be trained to undertake technical roles in the country’s growing power sector, thus closing up on the number of expatriates that will be employed in the sector.
Nebo said the government was wary of the country’s experience in her oil and gas sector which was mostly run by expatriate workers until a local content law was enacted to improve the technical and managerial competence of Nigerians, hence, it’s initiation of NAPSAS to first train 7,400 young Nigerians as electrical fitters, cable jointers, linesmen and district substation managers.

He explained that the government had initiated NAPSAS on the premise that the power sector will expand in capacity and require technical manpower to sustain such growth, adding that if Nigerians were not adequately prepared, expatriate technical workers will be imported by industry operators to work for them.
“For 16 years of NEPA and PHCN, the federal government did not employ technical people and did not provide structured training for 23 years; most of the people that were employed back then were part-time technical people and you cannot develop the sector with that kind of a framework.

What happened really was that the people were aging, getting sick, retiring and dying with no replacements for them and at the end of the day we are handing over to the private sector, totally deficient and technically incapacitated workforce,” Nebo said.
He further explained: This came about when I looked with my team at the power sector’s capacity to deliver and then noticed a yawning gap between what we have as a power sector today and then what a Nigerian power actually ought to be like.

It is a crisis situation we have, we want to train people in NAPSAS that are artisans; technicians, jointers, fitters, substation operators and all kinds of people through the electricity value chain.”
“The basic thing is that we want a ready-made workforce of core Nigerians in the technical and artisanal areas, a home-grown technical workforce that will drive the sector because for 16 years, workers were retiring and dying and nobody was replacing them and all of a sudden, there is such a huge gap,” he added.

Speaking on the development’s threat to the government’s power sector reforms, the minister said: “The essence of the power sector reforms is to provide Nigerians with employment, why do we have to go to other places to get people to work in our power sector if we can train our people in all these things? Why do we have to import technicians to come and do what Nigerians can easily do with minimum effort?
“It is really for local content purpose that we are doing this, to make sure that we have a vibrant market driven by home-grown workforce and we need this.”

“We cannot run away from it because if we don’t do it, the Chinese, Pakistani and Indians are coming. They are even here already and you see them doing jobs that Nigerians can do. Why don’t we train our people as we create these jobs so that when the international companies demand for expatriate quota, we can ask them if they have exhausted the local capacity that we have here?
It is going to take a while for this crisis to be over; we have been in a hole for a long time and we have to do these gradually,” he stated.

Culled from: http://www.thisdaylive.com