LAGOS – The Federal Government has unlocked over $1 billion in investments across the country’s oil and gas value chain since the inception of the current administration.
Olu Arowolo Verheijen, Special Adviser on Energy to the President of Nigeria, Office of Energy, disclosed this in a paper,”The Future of Energy: Shaping the Workforce of Tomorrow”,presented at the recent African Energy Week in Cape Town, South Africa, on November 5, 2024
She disclosed that by the middle of 2025,Nigeria expects to see Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) on two more projects, including a multibillion billion-dollar deepwater exploration project, which will be the first of its kind in Nigeria in over a decade.
Apart from investments, the presidential aide, said in the last twelve months, her team has clarified the regulatory roles to create an enabling environment for investments and introduced reforms targeted at reducing high operational costs and project execution timelines
The team also introduced a clear set of fiscal incentives for non-associated has and deep offshore oil & Gas gas exploration and production, she said.
She said, this is the first time that Nigeria is outlining a fiscal framework for deepwater gas since basin exploration commenced in 1991.
She added: “Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act took twenty years to be passed into law and given Presidential assent, in 2021. We are now building on that foundation with an unprecedented sense of urgency, to completely rewrite the narrative of oil and gas investment in Nigeria. We are already seeing the fruit of our work. Regulatory approvals are being expedited; major upstream investment decisions are being finalised
“We see the abundant opportunities that lie ahead. We see a Nigeria that is a leading global producer and exporter of energy – whether its fossil fuels or renewables. We are not held back by the outdated approaches and assumptions of the past. We are open, daring, and eager to leave a legacy that will stand the test of time.
“I will always be grateful to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for giving me this opportunity, and I intend to pay it forward, in all the ways that I can, for multitudes of young women out there just waiting in the wings for their own chance to show what they are capable of doing. I hope that in every country across Africa, these stories will be replicated, and the gender gaps that have come to define our landscape will be aggressively narrowed and closed.
“There is no doubt that the continent will be the better for it. Bringing the perspectives, capacity and the energy of its women, who make up half of the population, into the mix, is a requirement for building the Africa of our dreams”.
On her appointment as a presidential aide, she said it was a bold experiment on the part of President Bola Tinubu picking her without traditional consideration.
“For his energy adviser, a cabinet-level position, he selected me, a young woman, technocrat, with no political ambitions. It was and is a bold experiment in many ways – picking young, female and putting her in the space, and empowering her to be disruptive. The President could have picked a more traditional choice in the Nigerian context: male, older, more political, more government experience.
Let’s face it, I’m not the most likely candidate for such a role in the office of an African president. Previous presidential energy advisers in Nigeria have come from a very different mould. But President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a man driven to do things differently. You can see this in the bold macroeconomic reforms that have come to define his time thus far in office. He takes this maxim very seriously: “If you want to see different results, you need to do things differently.
“For his all-important energy reforms – he bet on a young woman and her team of disruptors, in a sector dominated by men. That’s how I ended up as the Special Adviser on Energy, overseeing the design and coordination of reforms in the oil, gas and power sectors from the President’s office. The President saw my capacity and competence, but even more importantly, he saw that I was a bringing a unique experience, youthful, multifaceted, global, adventurous, disruptive”.
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