Thanks to the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act (Local Content Law) local content is increasingly becoming a part of the day to day lexicon of professionals in Nigeria. The Local Content Law gives preferred status and, in some cases, exclusive status to Nigerians and Nigerian controlled companies in the grant of contracts, the use of material and human resource in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. It also makes it compulsory to utilize the Nigerian service industry. Our view is that the Act has achieved modest success in increasing the number of local players in the the oil and gas value chain from the downstream to the upstream sector. Compliance with the Act is certainly viewed as a prerequisite to doing business by IOCs and other oil companies. The effects of this has been consequential. Of all the recent divestments by IOCs, Nigerian content in its equity holding played a significant role.
Other industries are taking cue. There is currently a Nigerian content bill for the construction industry before the National Assembly and the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has recently said that it would release local content regulations for the power sector in February. These regulations will, among other things, "localize both technology and services". This, we assume, will mean requiring companies to manufacture equipment in Nigeria and to hire Nigerian staff.
It certainly appears as though the modest gains so far are an indication success of the local content policy drive ... time will tell though.
The Global Legal Post reported today that 90 per cent of legal fees paid on matters that arise from Africa are paid to law firms not based in Africa. At conference with UK based lawyers last year, many of the energy and infrastructure lawyers confirmed this saying that their 70 to 90 per cent of their work comes from Africa.This is a statistic that will pique African lawyers. The assumption is that African firms will enhance capacity to compete with foreign firms that take all this money (and that is a lot of money) away.
So far that has not happened, not because the African firms cannot compete (Nigerian and foreign firms all have African trained legal geniuses). The real question is whether firms will build up true partnerships, attract and keep the best human resource and begin to work to have active multi-jurisdictional practices. Until this happens foreign lawyers will see more of a case for setting up shop here to gun for the remaining 10 per cent.
You are a lover of the beautiful game and you sometimes fancy yourself as a sort of "player" or at least an armchair coach of sorts. Let's face it, football is clearly the most popular sport in our law firms and declaring your affiliation is one of the most important initial revelations you will make. It will certainly follow you through your stay in the firm and thereafter.
Well, within your firm, you might as well be a player. At least we like to think of it as such. Here's how: Every level in your firm is a different position. Partners are typically the strikers, closing deals and presenting cases before the courts are their "goals" (The Managing Partner is a coach/Captain). Your senior associates who put together the work associates do and bring experience to bear before presenting material to the partners are your midfield players. Like like Ozil and Fabregas they lay it up nicely for the partners to finish off (I often think if Lord Denning was in a law firm he would liken being an SA to being in the Court of Appeal as the MR and would relish it). Associates build up the game from the defense and form the building blocks of the work that seniors do. To do this you need a very good research and hardworking associate base.. Of course different players often interchange roles and play different roles.
Ok, all this is good fun, but who are you within your firm? Messi or Bentner; Mourinho or Moyes... :)
Its been a while since my last post. You know, things get busy...
Ok, so in preparation for posting Nigeria's Gold league law firm, below is an earlier post introducing them. I'll post the firms the next few posts...
In different countries they go by different names - Magic Circle, White Shoe Firms, Seven Sisters, Big Five etc. A monicker to describe a select group that is a class apart. And, in this sense, classis the operative word. An elite group that distinguishes itsellf by the strictest, though unofficial, membership requirements that (even in a country with our history) is earned and not bought. In the legal professions of most countries, these groups appear to have emerged from their peers almost naturally and with that most 'noble' desire to be exclusive. In the United States, the term White Shoe Law Firmwas reserved for firms with a long tradition (100 years or more) and (unfortunately) that met the WASP requirement (White Anglo Saxon Protestant). The initial members of the club were firms like Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy. As with most things American, times changed and the term later referred to big, old, east-coast and fairly traditional firms, thereby admitting Jewish and other ethnic nationalities to the fold (Remember this is not an official group but merely an understanding among peers).
In the very conservative United Kingdom, land where first among equals holds sway a la Queens Counsel and where the "poshness" of your spoken English sets you apart from the mass of humanity, the club took a more restrictive tone. 4 firms initially emerged - The Magic Circle. To be fair, a rational method is used to determine who belongs in the circle - earnings per partner and earnings per lawyer etc ... but, of course, prestige, schools attended by lawyers and so on provide a subtle subtext. The firms initially were - Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer andLinklaters. The circle is continuously evolving and now Slaughters & May, I hear, is a new entrant.
Now to Nigeria. Our biggest firms are generally yet to acheive the institutional form of their counterparts described above, so it really is still an open field. Yet, some have emerged over a 2 - 3 decade period as leaders. The biggest question (other than what to call our group) in a country with awful statistcs and high level secrecy among many firm partners, is how do we measure our own exclusive club? Our criteria is straightforward and firms meets each criteria to varying degrees - first, firm revenue; second, visibility (locally and internationally ...); third, a balanced practice (this requirement surpisingly is one of the hardest for our firms to keep up with), and finally, firm structure (another achilles heel). Perception is key, as this unofficial list is backed by a straw poll of lawyers. Well, who are our leading firms? Before I let you in on it, its sufficient to say that all that make the cut are truly writing their names in gold while fiercely competing for each other's business hence the name - the Gold League. Read about Nigeria's Gold League in subsequent posts.
Six out of 10 people who are trafficked to the West are Nigerians. PREMIUM TIMES investigative reporter, Tobore Ovuorie, was motivated by years of research into the plight of trafficked women in the country, as well as the loss of a friend, to go undercover in a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise. She emerged, bruised and beaten but thankfully alive, after witnessing orgies, big money deals in jute bags, police-supervised pickpocketing, beatings and even murder. This is her story.
We are 10 at the boot camp: Adesuwa, Isoken, Lizzy, Mairo, Adamu, Ini, Tessy, Omai, Sammy and I. We have travelled together in a 14 seater bus from Lagos, hoping to arrive in Italy soon. We are eager to get to the ‘next level’ as it is called: from local prostitution to hopefully earning big bucks abroad. But first, it turns out, we have to pass through ‘training’ in this massive secluded compound guarded by armed military men, far from any other human being, somewhere in the thick bushes outside Ikorodu, a suburb of Lagos. Our trafficker, Mama Caro, welcomes us in flawless English, telling us how lucky and special we are; then she ushers us to a room where we are to sleep on the floor without any dinner.
I had not expected this. We had exercised, through a risk analysis role play, in advance: my paper PREMIUM TIMES, and our partners on the project, a colleague–Reece Adanwenon– in the Republic of Benin, and ZAM Chronicle in Amsterdam. We had put in place contacts, emergency phone numbers, safe houses, emergency money accounts. We had made transport and extraction arrangements. Ms. Reece is waiting in Cotonou, 100 kilometers to the West in neighbouring Benin, to pick me up from an agreed meeting place. But we hadn’t foreseen that there was to be another stop first: this isolated, guarded camp in the middle of nowhere. It dawns on me that we could be in big trouble.
“Our trafficker, Mama Caro, welcomes us in flawless English, telling us how lucky and special we are; then she ushers us to a room where we are to sleep on the floor without any dinner.”
Risk analysis and preparation
It had all started in Abuja, with me deciding to expose the human traffic syndicates that caused the death, through Aids, of my friend Ifuoke and countless others. As a health journalist, I had interviewed several returnees from sex traffic who had not only been encouraged to have unprotected sex, but who had also been denied health care or even to return home when they fell ill. They were now suffering from Aids, anal gonorrhea, bowel ruptures and incontinence. In the case of some of them, who hailed from conservative religious backgrounds, doctors in their home towns had denied them any treatment because they had been ‘bad’. I was also aware that powerful politicians and government and army officials, who outwardly professed religious purity, were servicing and protecting the traffickers.I wanted to break through the hypocrisy and official propaganda and show how, every day, criminals in Nigeria are helped by the powerful to enslave my fellow young citizens. MyPREMIUM TIMES colleagues had done undercover work before; they had warned me of the risks, but had agreed to support me in my decision to go through with it. With my colleagues, and with the help of ZAM Chronicle, we then started in earnest.
“I wanted to break through the hypocrisy and official propaganda and show how, every day, criminals in Nigeria are helped by the powerful to enslave my fellow young citizens.”
Oghogho
I had advertised my wish to get to know a ‘madam’ whilst walking the streets of Lagos, dressed as a call girl.It worked. I had met Oghogho Irhiogbe, an accomplished, well-groomed graduate in her thirties (though she claimed to be only 26), and a wealthy human trafficker of note. My lucky hunch to tell her that my name was ‘Oghogho’ too had immediately warmed her to me. She told me I looked like her kid sister and from then on treated me like a favourite.
“Don’t worry about crossing borders and getting caught,” she had told me. “Immigration, customs, police, army and even foreign embassies are part of our network. You only run into trouble with them if you fail to be obedient to us.” I already knew this to be true. Two of the trafficked sex workers I had interviewed had tried to find help at Nigerian embassies in Madrid and Moscow, only to realise that the very embassy officials from whom they had sought deportation had immediately informed their pimps. They had eventually made it back to Nigeria only after they had developed visible diseases, such as AIDS-related Kaposi sarcoma.
“Precious had already made enough money to start building her own house in Enugu, halfway between Abuja and Port Harcourt.”
Oghogho Irhiogbe had been luckier. She owned four luxury cars, two houses in Edo State, and was busy completing the building of a third house near the Warri airport in Delta State. Others I had met through my initial ‘call girl’ exploits were clearly on their way to riches, too. Priye was set to go back to the Netherlands, where she worked before, to become a ‘madam’. Ivie and Precious were quite happy to go back to Italy. Precious had already made enough money to start building her own house in Enugu, halfway between Abuja and Port Harcourt.
Forza Speciale
It is on the windy Sunday evening of October 6 that I make my first contact with the outer ring of this mafia. A big party with VIPs is on the cards; the kind of party an ordinary girl, or rather ‘product’, as we are called by traffickers, is not usually invited to. But I am currently on a fortune ride: Oghogho’s favourite. Additionally, I have been classified as ‘Special Forces’, or ‘Forza Speciale’ as my new contacts say, borrowing the Italian term. It’s a rule of thumb, I understand, that a syndicate subjects girls to classification through a check on their nude bodies and I, too – in the company of some male and female judges, headed by a trafficker called Auntie Precious – had been checked. I had received the highest classification. “This means that you don’t have to walk the streets. You can be an escort for important clients,” Auntie Precious had told me in a soft, congratulatory tone. The ones of ‘lesser’ classification were referred to as Forza Strada, the Road Force.
The party is held at a gorgeous residence along the Aguiyi Ironsi Way in Maitama, Abuja. This is designed to be a festive end to a great day, in which we went to church, hung out at the choicest places in town, shopped and got dressed in a suite at the Abuja power citadel, meeting point of the elite, the Transcorp Hilton.
“The ‘dividend’ is not from prostitution and trafficking alone, but Oghogho won’t tell me what the other source is.”
It is more like an orgy. Male and female strippers entertain guests, drugs abound, alcohol is everywhere in unrestrained flow; there is romping in the open. Also, big bags of money are changing hands. Barely an hour after we arrive, Oghogho receives a big jute bag, which is delivered from another room. As we walk out and she puts the money in the boot of her car, she smiles at me. “Don’t worry; very soon, you’ll get to receive dividend.” This ‘dividend’ is not from prostitution and trafficking alone, but Oghogho won’t tell me what the other source is. “When you come on board fully, you’ll know.”
A retired army colonel from the Abacha era sees to it that we are not disturbed. “He has top connections and sees to a smooth flow of the business,” Oghogho tells me.
Pickpocketing training
How ‘top’ these connections are, I find when I am taken with a group of girls to be trained in pickpocketing. We, a group of ten ‘products’, are placed at various crowded bus stops in the suburb of Ikorodu, where we must ‘practice’ under the guard of two army officers, a policeman as well as a number of male ‘trainers’. The policeman doesn’t even bother to cover his name badge: Babatunde Ajala, it reads.
The general operation is supervised by Mama Caro, popularly called Mama C, a 50-something, light-complexioned, busty woman. Her deputy is a Madam Eno. Mama C has told us that pickpocketing is a crucial skill for the Forza Speciale: we will need to be able to pick valuables from clients. She adds that the pickings are added to the girls earnings, so we will be able to pay off our debts– commonly called ‘meeting our targets’ – in a short time.
When I perform dismally, Eno rains abuses on me. We are all to stay at the bus stop until I pick an item from somebody. It is already 11 PM.Tired, hungry and angry with me, Adesuwa, Isoken and the policeman guarding my group pick some extra pockets and hand me the items, so that I can show them to Eno.
“ We practice pickpocketing under the guard of two army officers and a policeman”
The next day, the bumpy journey to the ‘training camp’ appears endless. My fellow ‘products’ are snoozing and I battle to stay awake, wondering if we are tired or drugged. I note the bus moving off the main road somewhere around Odogunyan, into thick bushes, almost a forest.We stop at a compound guarded by armed military men. As my fellow ‘products’ wake up, it is clear that they think we are still in Lagos.
New names and indenture
The next day starts with strip tease and lap dance training after breakfast, and thereafter poise and etiquette. Five other girls have arrived in the meantime. They are all graduates, leaving for Italy fully aware of what they are to do there. “If I get caught by local police, I will just tell them I was trafficked against my will,” one of them, Gbemi, says light-heartedly. “I don’t think oyinbo (white man) will believe Mama C if she says that I am there voluntarily.”
I receive a crash course in pedicure and manicure because I am so bad at pickpocketing. “You’ll be utilizing these skills at my wellness centre in Italy,” Mama C says, after scolding me for being lazy and testing her patience. “You will be working on only men whilst wearing sexy dresses. That will enable you to attract customers.”
“Mama C makes us sign a statement that we have willingly embarked on the journey”
Later, Mama C makes everyone sign a statement that they have willingly embarked on the journey and that they are to return certain sums as professional fees to her. No girl is given a copy of what she has signed and the amount varies inexplicably: while Isoken signs up for a debt of US $100,000, I will have only US $70,000 to pay. We are told that we will receive new passports with false names and even false nationalities in Cotonou. I am to become a Kenyan, Mairo South African, and so on. “I have boys in the Benin immigration office,” boasts Mama C.
Horror
A just-arrived traditional ‘doctor’ then puts us through rites that involve checking the horoscope of each girl as well as collecting some of her blood, fingernails, hair and pubic hair. He then picks out four of us as ‘problematic’ and says we will bring ‘bad luck’. Either he is really clairvoyant or he is a professional security operative who has run background checks on us, because he is right about at least three of the four. Two of us have had unfortunate earlier experiences involving deportation back to Nigeria and are possibly known to the authorities in Europe. I am number three.
What happens next is like a horror movie.
As we ‘unlucky’ four, are standing aside, Mama C talks with five well-dressed, classy, influential-looking visitors.The issue is a ‘package’ that Mama C has promised them and that she hasn’t been able to deliver. The woman points at me, but Mama C refuses and for unexplained reasons Adesuwa and Omai are selected. We all witness, screaming and trying to hide in corners, as they are grabbed and beheaded with machetes in front of us. The ‘package’ that the visitors have come for turns out to be a collection of body parts. The mafia that holds us is into organ traffic, too.
“We all witness Adesuwa and Omai being beheaded in front of us. The ‘package’ that the visitors have come for turns out to be a collection of body parts. ”
With all of us trembling and crying, I and the other three ‘unsuitable’ ones are herded into a separate room. Mama C comes later to take me to yet another room for questioning. Angry beyond measure, she whips me all night, telling me to yield information on the ‘forces’ protecting me. “You are going nowhere,” she keeps shouting. “I have invested too much in you!”
Clearing the ‘spirit’
The next morning Mama C eats her breakfast while I starve: I have last eaten the previous morning. When she finished, and whilst the ‘approved products’ leave for Cotonou, Benin, to commence their journey to Italy, Mama C takes us four ‘unsuitables’ to visit three new, different ‘doctors’: one in the Agege neighbourhood of Lagos, the second in rural Sango Ota village and the third in remote Abeokuta in Ogun State. She clearly believes in traditional ‘medicine’ and is desperate to find a treatment for the ‘demons’ we are said to carry.
The first two ‘doctors’ agree with the first one that I am bad news, but the third, after roughly cutting off most of my hair, declares me free from the ‘spirit’. The ‘evil spirits’ in the other three girls, meanwhile, have been ‘beaten out of them’ with dry whips. Back at the camp the first ‘doctor’ rages at Mama C for approving me, insisting that the ‘doctor’ who ‘freed me from the spirit’ is a fraud. “This girl will bring about your downfall! You will end up in jail!” I am all the more convinced that he possesses not supernatural powers, but certain information.The syndicates are well-connected and someone may have told him that I am not who I say I am. The ‘doctor’ keeps repeating that ‘forces’ are protecting me. But Mama C insists that she is not to lose her investment.
“The ‘doctor’ keeps repeating that ‘forces’ are protecting me. But Mama C insists that she is not to lose her investment.”
Meanwhile, new ‘products’ have arrived to pass through the rites that night. The whole camp is again in the grip of fear as chilling screams indicate that some of the new arrivals – two girls and a young man, I learned later – are also murdered.
“Oghogho, I wonder what actually brought you here. I never expected a girl like you to venture into this,” says one of Mama C’s errand boys, as he enters the room I had again been locked in later that night with a plate of food.He seems well disposed to me. “You found and returned my Blackberry that I lost during one of the pickpocketing training sessions,” he explains. I had not realised the escort whose phone I found had been this boy; then, he had worn a cap pressed deep into his eyes. “Other girls would just have kept my phone,” he says. “You don’t belong here.I keep wondering what level of poverty has made you endanger yourself. You don’t deserve this.”
The plate of food is all I need to get my strength back. We are to travel the following morning.
Escape
As we are about to leave, I lose my phone to the army officer. Searching all of us, he has taken Isoken’s phone already and she has pointed at me to divert attention from herself, saying I had a phone too. He takes mine at gunpoint.I can only thank the heavens that it is dead. I had been upset because it didn’t charge the previous night, but the fact that it won’t switch on is my second lucky break: it has a lot of pictures and conversations I have recorded in the camp. The disadvantage of losing my phone is that I can’t contact our colleague Reece, who is to help me once I get to Cotonou. I also can’t communicate with my editors back in Nigeria.
All along the road leading up to the border, police and customs officers wave and greet Madam Eno and our head of operations, Mr James. Nigerian Immigrations and Customs officers also greet us warmly at the border post itself, whilst enquiring if there is anything in it for them today.
“Welcome, Madam! How have sales been?”
Eno: “Not much.”
“But your batch was allowed entry yesterday, so why claim you haven’t been making sales? “
Eno: “We are not the owner of yesterday’s batch of girls. We own these ones in this bus.”
“Haaa!You want to play a smart one? Not to worry, your boss will sort all this out with us.”
The officers then wave the minibus through without any form of documentation.
The original plan was for me to go with the transport as far as Cotonou, the capital of our neighbouring country Benin. But I don’t want to stretch it any longer. The border is usually very crowded and I plan to escape as soon as we are there. It works. Just after the Seme border post, in front of a crowded, muddy market, I run. Merging with the crowd, I take my top off – I have another top under it – and cover my head with a scarf. The army officer is following me, looking for me. I dive into a store and lose him.
“Just after the Seme border post, in front of a crowded, muddy market, I ran.”
I travel the twenty kilometres from the border motor park to Cotonou by minibus taxi.Colleague Reece – alerted by a phone call the driver helps make to her to ensure that she will be there to pay him – will wait for me there. Upon arrival, I see a woman I recognise from her Facebook photo. “Reece?”“Tobore!” She cries and holds out her arms to catch me. “I am safe.”
In-House counsel to Nippon Telephone & Telegraph corp., once complained about outside counsel inviting him to lunch and charging him for the food in a subsequent invoice. In some ways, that story represents the pre 2008. Those good old days, when lawyers could charge for any and every thing ... photocopying, yep. Lunch, yep. Cab fares, yep. First class flight, yeo. Trip to gntle man's club, ditto. That was at least before the financial crisis after which the client's magnifying glass got orders of magnitude bigger. Clients also started to review not only the hourly fees but moved more to the fixed fee and success fee (rate tied to transaction success) neighbourhood.
Some US firms also began to outsource legal work (you know the same way phone companies outsource customer call centres) to Indian firms set up for that purpose. Johnson and Johnson, a US health care products company was even more innovative. It subscribed to legal research sites and asked outside counsel to use its subscribed service rather than charge it for the costs of legal research. Clients were cutting costs aggressively and some thought that this meant the death of the billable hour especially in countries that did not have a long history of it.
Things didn't quite work out that way. While firms like Linklaters and Clifford Chance reportedly increased the number of fixed fees and success fees. Charging by the hour remained the dominant mode of charging.
In Nigeria, top firms including the Gold League firms typically charge at dollar rates, but for (inexplicably, when you consider the value add) somewhat less than what foreign counsel will charge. However, Nigerian firms also face the same cost cutting, with clients asking for lawyers to put "skin in the game". However, in Nigeria like in other countries the billable hour has arguably increased in use and is likely to become more standardized with time.
We had quite a few responses to our post on long hours by professionals and many wanted to know what the story is with Nigerian law firms. As a general rule, big Nigerian firms will take up a lot of your time. "Sleeping in the office" or doing an "all - nighter" are common lawyer refrains. It has become a culture among some firms and contrarians are looked upon as deviants. Some in the investment bank community (investment bankers are certainly culprits as well) however take a different view. They see it as the difference between being efficient and just raking up the hours. A New York investment banker said to us that there is certainly a diminishing return element to excessively long hours. However, with years of experience, you get to a point where a good professional will perform and long hours will only mean churning out more of the same for her/him. One big question is whether juniors are adding value by staying put at work or whether the are merely performing a perceived rite de passage.
Two firms are particularly known for long hours: Banwo & Ighodalo; and Olaniwun Ajayi LP. Many have to work well past the 8-9 pm mark.
Other big firms are certainly not shy about asking lawyers to conclude the day's brief before going home, but on the average, they do not have a culture of really long hours.
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We (Nigerians) really really really like education. This informs why so many have studied and continue to study across borders at different levels of education in America Europe, Asia etc. This series of posts would look at the differences in legal education across borders and share experiences which hopefully may provide clarity for someone trying to make a choice. The typical route is - first degree in Nigeria and then, immediately after, a masters in the first degree discipline in either the US or the UK. This is however not the only option to chart a career path nor is it by any means necessarily the best option. For example, if your real goal is to live and work in a foreign country on the long term, while the above path may work, you'll suffer a competitive disadvantage right of the bat (if you are a lawyer). The most important question (if you are willing to ask these questions that early on) is what is your career/life goal. An easier way of framing this is, what is your 10 year plan. Whatever your answer to this question is should seriously influence your next decision. There are a couple of common answers to the above which I have heard from students and young professionals over the years by far the most popular are - "A masters will help my career" and "I don't know". Both are fair answers but neither answers the question. Over the next couple of posts on the topic, I'll ask questions that are intended to be insightful and attempt answers that should be a guide to students and young professionals.
Through a statement released by the Presidency today, President Goodluck Jonathan replaced all Army Cheifs. Air Marshal Alex Badeh replaces Admiral Ola Sa'ad Ibrahim as Chief of Defence staff. Major-General Kenneth Tobiah Jacob Minimah replaces Lieutenant-General Azubike Ihejirika as Chief of Army Staff. Other changes include the appointment of Rear Admiral Usman O. Jibrin as the new Chief of Naval Staff and Air Vice Marshal Adesola Nunayon Amosu has become the Chief of Air Staff, a position previously held by newly promoted Badeh. Read the tea leafs through this action and 2015 comes sharply into focus. Is this a pre emptive move or an addendum to GEJ's reply letter to OBJ? ... you decide. On the legal tip, last year, the Federal High Court presided over by Justice Bello declared the appointment of the former Sevice Cheifs null and void becuse it did not comply with the provisions of sections 18 (1) and (2) of the Armed Forces Act. Section 18(1) provides: (1) The President, may, after consultation with the Chief of Defence Staff and subject to confirmation by the National Assembly, appoint such officers (in this Act referred to as "the Service Chiefs") as he thinks fit, in whom the command of the Army, Navy and Air Force, as the case may be, and their Reserves shall be vested. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with the new appoitments.
Thanks to the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act (Local Content Law) local content is increasingly becoming a part of the day to day lexicon of professionals in Nigeria. The Local Content Law gives preferred status and, in some cases, exclusive status to Nigerians and Nigerian controlled companies in the grant of contracts, the use of material and human resource in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. It also makes it compulsory to utilize the Nigerian service industry. Our view is that the Act has achieved modest success in increasing the number of local players in the the oil and gas value chain from the downstream to the upstream sector. Compliance with the Act is certainly viewed as a prerequisite to doing business by IOCs and other oil companies. The effects of this has been consequential. Of all the recent divestments by IOCs, Nigerian content in its equity holding played a significant role.
