Pereowei Subai, Local Content Oil and Gas Law in Africa: Lessons from Nigeria and Beyond
| Pages | 130-134 |
| DOI | 10.3366/gels.2020.0013 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
At the centre of most developed and developing resource-rich countries is the discussion about local content. Countries seek to develop and integrate their local content in hydrocarbon development. This comes through local content laws, policies, and strategies to grow the local economy, expertise, and create employment opportunities. As already stated, considerations of local content laws and practices (LCLP) applies beyond Africa. It extends to developed and established hydrocarbon nations such as Norway, UK, USA, Canada and Australia, and to developing economies such as India, Brazil and Malaysia. This book provides discussions about local content laws in several countries, thus, aligning with its focus on ‘
The book covers 191 pages and comes with hardcover binding, making it easy to handle. The language employed is simple and easy to understand by professionals and non-professionals in the oil and gas industry. The referencing is apt with relevant footnotes, and the bibliography adequate to underscore or explain the main text. The book explains in details the Nigerian Oil and Gas Content Development Act 2010 (NOCDA), after examining the failure of the past Nigerian local content laws and practices which are contained in the Petroleum Act 1969, and other contractual agreements between the Nigerian National Oil Company/Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and other International Oil Companies (IOCs). This was considered along with the minimal beneficial impacts these loose forms of local content practices had to bear in Nigeria; hence the need for a more robust legislative instrument in the form of NOGCDA 2010 (p.53).
The book in Chapter then turns to evaluate the impacts of local content laws in what is referred to as other ‘Resources Rich Regions (RRR)’ such as the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Scotland in the UK. The author notes that the absence of robust local content laws in Nigeria had engendered mixed impacts both for the region and the IOCs operating in Nigeria. Some of the effects identified on the part of the host nation include environmental degradation, lack of capacity development, resource control agitations, poverty a resource curse. On the part of the IOCs, the book identified kidnapping and hostage-taking of the...
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