> AMY JADESIMI Wandering into Oil and Gas Dr Amy Jadesimi is a high-achieving, resourceful young Nigerian businesswoman with a career that offers testimony to her belief that hard work pays off. She is committed to ensuring that Nigeria gains the maximum benefit from the development and exploitation of its rich offshore oil and gas resources. “I grew up with a very strong sense of pride in what it means to be Nigerian and what we can achieve as people. This conviction contradicted the feedback I received from the wider world. For me, it is very important that we, as Nigerians, take time out to look for personal heroes and learn about our heritage. We need to find out who we actually are and what we have achieved as people, instead of listening to the negative narrative the world gives us.” Marked out as a high-flier from an early age, Dr Jadesimi graduated from Oxford University as a medical doctor. Chance led her away from an intended career as a surgeon. After a spell working at a hospital, Dr Jadesimi joined Goldman Sachs International in London as part of the Investment Banking Division, specialising in corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. The job at Goldman Sachs was meant to be a year out from medicine, but in the event she found investment banking so enjoyable that medicine went by the board. A sojourn at Stanford Business School led to an MBA and then it was back to Nigeria to set up a financial consultancy firm. The move into offshore oil and gas infrastructure came when Dr Jadesimi joined her father, Oladipo Jadesimi, at the Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base (LADOL) – the largest privately-financed such establishment in Nigeria which he had founded in 2001. Dr Jadesmi is now managing director of Nigeria’s only locally-owned deep offshore logistics base. However, promotion to the top was not a given: Dr Jadesmi had to work her way up through the ranks, proving her ability to the management team. In fourteen years, LADOL has turned a former industrial wasteland into a $500 million industrial zone and port facility for the offshore oil and gas industry. The LADOL Free Zone base is now a centre for drilling and production support, ship building and repairs, and manufacturing and engineering. The facility in Apapa harbour delivers vessel dry-dock and repair, oil drilling rig repair, and fabrication services to maritime and international oil companies operating in the upstream sector of the sector. The modern facility includes a high load-bearing quay, workshop, warehouses, hotel, offices, passenger jetties, marine craft, and certified handling equipment.
For the past thirty years, ninety percent of Nigerian oil and gas projects have been developed by foreign companies. In 2010, the government passed the Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act to increase the role of indigenous companies in the industry – a mainstay of Nigeria’s economy. The government wants increased involvement of Nigerian companies in order that the country may become the primary hub for oil and gas and the maritime industry in West Africa. With Dr Jadesimi at the helm, LADOL seized the opportunity, embarking on a joint venture with Samsung Heavy Industries – one of the largest shipbuilders in the world – to invest in a fabrication and vessel-integration facility suitable for building and repairing a wide range of ships. The first contract is to build a huge floating production, storage, and offloading vessel (FPSO) for the Egina Project, Total’s huge development in the deep waters off the coast of Nigeria. Dr Jadesimi has ambitious goals for the future. She wants LADOL to build the largest dry dock in West Africa, creating as many as 100,000 jobs. In collaboration with other facilities in Nigeria she wants to see clusters of engineering, steel manufacturing, general fabrication, offshore
fabrication, and training developed across the country. However, doing business in Nigeria is not easy. Earlier this year the Nigerian Port Authority ordered LADOL to relocate to Agge, a fishing community in distant Bayelsa State. This was followed by an instruction to switch the fabrication and FPSO facility to the new location – an under-developed area with limited facilities and no infrastructure. These unrealistic directives have apparently come out of government’s desire to decentralise and stimulate development in other parts of the country. However, issuing instructions cannot convert an under-developed fishing port lacking road access and mains electricity into a suitable site for a massive construction project. Sorting out this obstacle will test Dr Jadesimi’s political skills. LADOL took the case to the Federal High Court where, in May 2015, a judge granted injunctions restraining the government from carrying out the order. From medicine to finance to oil and gas may seem an unlikely trajectory, but credit to Dr Jadesimi for honing in on opportunity to exert the maximum influence in bringing jobs and prosperity to her homeland.
“She wants LADOL to build the largest dry dock in West Africa, creating as many as 100,000 jobs.” 136
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