Grey hair, black gold: Nigeria’s oil industry calls back retirees as skills pipeline falters

Fifty-four years ago, Abdullah Bukar joined Shell’s Lagos office as a trainee facilities engineer. He spent 35 years with the company, becoming general manager of engineering for its businesses in Nigeria, before retiring early in 2007.

Nearly two decades later, Bukar, 78, remains active. After his time at Shell, he helped develop the Uquo marginal field and led its surface production facilities unit. Since 2016, he has been a director and technical adviser at Lagos-based Frontier Oil and occasionally consults for Dangote Industries, the operator of Africa’s largest refinery.

Are veterans returning because companies cannot find enough expertise? “Yes, it is true. I am one of them,” he tells The Africa Report.

Bukar also chairs the Abuja-based People Expertise and Excellence Foundation, which promotes skills development. His mentees include Bayo Ojulari, who spent more than three decades at Shell before leaving in 2021 and became group CEO of the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) last year.

Lanre Kalejaiye followed a similar path. After more than 34 years at Chevron, he retired in December 2021 as a Houston-based general manager of operations. He joined indigenous producer ND Western as a senior vice-president in February 2024 and became CEO three months later.

ND Western is one of five companies in the Renaissance Africa Energy Company consortium that acquired Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) in 2024. Five months into his tenure, Kalejaiye said ND Western was addressing the talent gap through career development, technical training and succession planning.

Chikezie Nwosu, former chair of the Society of Petroleum Engineers Nigeria Council, confirms the trend. He worked for more than 30 years at Shell, Addax Petroleum and Waltersmith Petroman Oil, retiring as Waltersmith’s CEO in 2023.

“I’ve been invited several times to come back. I’ve said no,” says Nwosu, now founder and group CEO of HSI Energies. Two of his general managers — both former Shell exploration and geosciences chiefs — are on secondment to indigenous operators lacking in-house expertise.

‘An existential threat’

Oil remains Nigeria’s economic backbone, generating much of its foreign-exchange earnings and government revenue while providing some of the country’s best-paid jobs. Yet the industry is struggling to find enough specialists to operate increasingly complex assets.

“There is a manpower and competence crisis emerging, and it is one that poses an existential threat to the industry,” Aradel Holdings CEO and Independent Petroleum Producers Group (IPPG) chair Gbite Falade told an Abuja gathering on 7 July.

Nwosu says returning retirees help bridge the competence gap, but their return reveals a deeper pipeline failure. Nigeria has talented young people, he says, yet they lack “the right developmental exposure”.

In April, Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission head Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan warned that weak human capacity could harm the entire sector. International financiers assess Nigeria as a whole, not each operator in isolation, she said, urging indigenous producers to meet the standards set by international oil companies (IOCs).

“If we do not bring our human capacity to par, then we will be creating a big problem for ourselves,” she told an IPPG delegation.

The pipeline that produced experts

Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies and Eni built Nigeria’s industry and talent base through structured pathways that turned graduates into drilling engineers, geoscientists, project managers and production specialists. Nigerian employees received specialised training, international assignments and access to global technical networks.

Bukar benefited from that system. In 1969, he was among 24 Nigerians awarded Shell scholarships to study mechanical engineering in Britain. The group included Mansur Ahmed, a future NNPC and Dangote Group executive, and the late Joseph Makoju, later CEO of Dangote Cement.

“We were extremely lucky,” Bukar says, recalling contractors’ training colleges and Shell schools established to prepare local employees for production roles.

As Nigerian universities expanded, Shell ended its overseas scholarships in the late 1970s but introduced funding for domestic degrees. Bukar later helped develop the Shell Intensive Training Program (SITP), created during university strikes that left some students taking eight or nine years to complete three- or four-year degrees. Operated by SPDC in Warri for 11 years, it trained about 1,700 people, according to the Nexus Alliance programme manager.

“Many SITP graduates now hold strategic industry positions”, Bukar says. “The sad thing is that it stopped. I cannot say anything comparable has replaced it.” The programme ended amid insecurity and militant attacks that prompted Shell to move its western operational headquarters from Warri to Lagos in 2013.

Nwosu says that professionals now in their fifties to late sixties received comprehensive IOC training, with many becoming founders and asset owners. The cohort 10-15 years younger also received meaningful, though increasingly localised, development. One example was the Institute of Petroleum Studies, established at the University of Port Harcourt in 2003 in collaboration with France’s IFP School and the NNPC/TotalEnergies Joint Venture.

From underinvestment to divestment

Training opportunities have dwindled over the past 15 years as IOCs reduced programmes, delayed major projects and sold onshore and shallow-water assets to local companies, which now produce more than half of Nigeria’s oil.

Repeated delays to the Petroleum Industry Bill, and oil-price collapses in 2014-2016 and 2020 depressed investment. In August 2022, output fell below 1 million barrels per day, from a 2010 peak of 2.58 million.

“Recruitment tracks activity,” says Alpha Oilwell Technologies CEO Geoffrey Nwankwo. Activity has recovered, but companies did not train people during the slowdown. “It takes time to train a good engineer.”

Falade said IOC divestments have worsened the shortage, while technological change, new business models and new sources of capital have transformed the skills employers require.

“It is therefore incumbent on every operator to commit significant effort and investment to hiring, training and empowering the right talent,” he said. “This is not corporate social responsibility. It’s at the core of our business viability.”

A case for shared investment

Many local operators that acquired divested assets recruited from the same ageing workforce trained by IOCs.

“There is a demographic challenge of replacing those experienced people,” says Nwosu. “A lot of the CEOs have either retired, like myself, or are retiring. The next generation is not that many.”

Margaret Porbeni, chief executive of Trifort International, says the cost and time required to develop technical personnel may deter companies from training them, particularly when competitors can quickly hire them.

“We end up poaching competence rather than creating it,” she said on LinkedIn on 13 August.

The recent surge in emigration, known as ‘japa’ — Yoruba for ‘to escape’ — has further reduced the talent pool. Inflation and currency depreciation have eroded local salaries, prompting engineers to seek better-paid work in the Middle East, Europe, North America and other African oil-producing markets.

Nwosu argues that indigenous producers must jointly establish an industry-wide training system modelled on those of oil majors. “No single indigenous company can handle that on its own,” he says.

Graduates lack industry-ready skills

The need is growing as indigenous operators revive acquired assets and majors expand deepwater operations through billion-dollar investments. President Bola Tinubu aims to increase production from about 1.6 million bpd to 3 million by 2030.

“Nigeria does not have a shortage of graduates, but there is a shortage of qualified talent,” says Mayowa Afe, a former president of the Oil and Gas Trainers Association of Nigeria and the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists. Artificial intelligence, digital modelling and other technologies are advancing faster than university curricula and teaching capacity.

Adeola Adenikinju, a professor and former director of the University of Ibadan’s Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law, says universities once had simulation equipment but can no longer afford it. Training has consequently become largely theoretical, while some institutions also lack appropriately skilled lecturers.

Porbeni stresses that classroom training must be followed by supervised work in real operating environments. But student numbers exceed available placements, and some specialised offshore personnel must train abroad because Nigeria lacks the necessary equipment, facilities and expertise.

Rebuilding education and training

The Federal University of Petroleum Resources and the Petroleum Training Institute (PTI) was established in Delta State in 1972 to support Nigeria’s OPEC membership and to develop local capacity. Bukar says Nigeria should have replicated and strengthened PTI’s industry-oriented model rather than prioritising degree-awarding status.

Afe says major wage disparities draw instructional talent away from academia, noting that employees at ExxonMobil or Shell may earn 10 times a University of Ibadan professor’s salary. Universities should also become research hubs, developing software for oil-service companies.

Industry groups are responding. The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) and Renaissance recently launched a 12-month programme for 300 Nigerians in mechanical, electrical and instrumentation engineering, comprising three months of classroom instruction and nine months of on-the-job training with service companies.

On 31 July, NNPC deployed more than 1,000 young professionals following a one-year development programme. Recruited in 2024, they were its first intake since NNPC became a limited liability company in 2022.

On 6 August, the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) convened industry, academia, funders and government to design an industry-wide academy. It would offer graduates intensive joint training in geosciences, petroleum engineering, artificial intelligence and data analytics, followed by mandatory internships. The initiative addresses what NAPE calls a growing shortage of technically competent subsurface professionals.

The drive includes research. On 13 August, NLNG and NCDMB broke ground at Rivers State University for the NLNG Research and Innovation Centre for Computer and Electrical Engineering. The centre will house laboratories for electronics and signal processing, robotics and embedded systems, software engineering, and digital forensics and cybersecurity.

In the meantime, could the return of retirees reduce opportunities for young engineers amid high graduate unemployment?

Adenikinju says the effect depends on programme design. “Younger graduates should be attached to experienced professionals for deliberate on-the-job training and mentorship, ensuring knowledge transfer rather than replacement.” Returning veterans could also reduce reliance on costly expatriates and improve Nigeria’s ability to manage large projects, he adds.

“It is our social duty to try as much as possible to help the younger ones come along and make sure that Nigeria runs its oil and gas industry with Nigerians,” says industry veteran Bukar. (The Africa Report)