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NCDMB Seeks Insurance Industry Support to Achieve NOGICD Act Mandate 

By Moses Patience Chat

The Executive Secretary (ES) of the Nigerian Content and Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Simbi Wabote, has urged the insurance industry to support the Board in reaching the guidelines stipulated in the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act of 2010.

Wabote who made the call at the 2023 Oriental News Nigeria conference in Lagos, with the theme, “Building Local Content Synergy between the Oil and Gas and the Insurance Sector in Nigeria” noted that over the years, NCDMB has taken deliberate steps to forge collaboration with various critical stakeholders to support the attainment of its strategic goals and mandate. 

The ES who was represented by Daziba Patrick Obah, Director of Corporate Services at NCDMB, said that stakeholders’ engagement and collaboration is one of the key enablers to the board’s ten-year strategic road map designed to achieve 70 per cent Nigerian content performance by the year 2027.

 The main benefit of the guidelines according to Wabote, is the creation of a database of all insurance programs procured by the operators, project promoters, alliance partners, and Nigerian indigenous companies, to enable the Board monitor utilization of in-country insurance capacity thereby enhancing in-country value retention.

“It is worthy to emphasize that collaboration between government agencies is crucial for effective public service delivery through alignments of areas of strength, better decision-making, sharing of resources, optimization of opportunities and better understanding of issues and challenges with policy implementation. 

“This ultimately, create huge benefits for both country and citizens, as it enables collaborating agencies to understand and respond to the needs and expectations of Nigerians. In NCDMB, we recognize the importance of collaboration and synergy amongst government organizations and other stakeholders to the fulfilment of our statutory mandate.

The Executive Secretary described the theme of the conference as apt and timely as it underscores the imperative of fostering the much-needed collaboration and synergy amongst MDAs and critical stakeholders; in this case between two critical regulators in the Oil and Gas Industry and the Insurance Industry.

 “There is no doubt that Nigeria has not extracted sufficient value across the Nigerian oil and gas industry value chain since the commencement of hydrocarbon mining in Nigeria. It is this very low indigenous participation in the hydrocarbon value-chain in Nigeria that necessitated the enactment of the NOGICD Act in 2010 with the sole aim of deepening local content in the nations’ economy. 

“Similarly, the performance of the insurance sector, particularly in relation to oil and gas businesses, is also sub-optimal due to various reasons.” Wabote observed.

Speaking further he said that building synergy between these two critical sectors of our economy holds huge potentials for growth and development of the Nigerian economy, adding, “The summit, therefore, presents a great opportunity for key stakeholders to brainstorm on the benefits and challenges impeding optimal performance in these two critical sectors. Furthermore, this summit offers us a strong veritable platform for the Insurance Industry, the Oil and Gas Industries, and other stakeholders to articulate processes, procedures, and practices to forge sustainable collaboration in optimizing opportunities and harnessing benefits for themselves as Nigerians.”

“To give life to these sections of the NOGIC Act, NCDMB and NAICOM set up a Technical Committee which developed the structures and strategies to promote and ease interface between both regulatory institutions. One of the tools to ease the interface between the two bodies involved the development of the NOGIC JQS Statutory Reporting Module which makes submission of insurance performance report by oil and gas companies to NCDMB automatically accessible to NAICOM for prompt review and feedback to NCDMB. The benefit of this virtual interface is to reduce the turnaround time and to promote the ease of doing business. NCDMB and NAICOM are still fine-tuning the Application Programming Interface to enhance its functionality and efficiency.” he said.

Wabote added that in the spirit of collaboration, NCDMB is poised to work with NAICOM as a credible partner every inch of the way to get around some of these obstacles particularly within the boundaries of our statutory mandate.

“NAICOM and other stakeholders need to also work assiduously to forge and promote mergers of insurance companies to enhance their efficiencies and improve their market share as part of their collective benefits,” he said.

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