Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) says it has safeguarded 60,000 bpd of crude oil with 900 community jobs for pipelines surveillance in three clusters in the Land East Hub. The company said it is prepared to carry out a full roll-out of the system to all land areas based […]
Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) says it has safeguarded 60,000 bpd of crude oil with 900 community jobs for pipelines surveillance in three clusters in the Land East Hub. The company said it is prepared to carry out a full roll-out of the system to all land areas based on the near zero incident free outcome of the pilot scheme.The declaration was made recently by Boniface Nongo, SPDC’s Wells Reservoir & Facilities Lead, Manager for the Land East Asset at the ‘Youth Summit for Land East Hub Host Communities (Rivers, Abia, Imo) in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital.
It was aimed at creating a sustainable environment for businesses to grow and to attract investors that would create jobs. So, when you are giving peace a chance, when you are creating peaceful environment, you are creating jobs.
Nongo stood in for Sam Ezugworie, the Assets Manager for the area. The event was attended by about 70 youth leaders from the host communities of the Land East Asset who were being made to learn the new ways of getting fulfilment in life to reduce violent tendencies by oil host youths.
In an interview after his presentation, the Benue expert said the demand by some youth leaders for Shell to hand over surveillance contracts to community youths had just been approved, after a pilot scheme proved it more viable.
Nongo said “Shell has already approved what we call enhanced surveilance strategy already pilotted in three clusters of Ukwa West, Agbada and Ikwerre cluster development boards where we work with the landlord community contractors to provide surveillance on our pipelines. We engage four persons per km, so two in the day and at night. That way, we were able to generate jobs for 900 persons in Imo and Agbeda communities. That has safeguarded over 60,000 bpd in the past eight months with near-zero incident. It is an affirmation that their suggestion has already been accepted.”
He also said ‘Management has approved a go-forward plan that we should deploy to the whole land assets by July 2018. Our youths will be directly employed to oversee our assets. We hope that things cannot happen except there is an insider. We now give them the responsibility to look over our assets.
On what is in it for the community youths, Nongo said “We have deployed a system called the consequence managemnet system where you do not have an incident and get a bonus and stay (on the bonus) until when there is incident, you go back to zero. When there is repeated incidents, you can be challenged in the community and be removed. We pay them above minimum wage. We are getting value for that.”
Explaining more, Evans Krukrubo, the community interface manager, who represented the GM External Relations, Igo Weli, said in an interview that it was not true that Shell jettisioned the community contract system at any point as peddled by some non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
He said in some places where there were community surveillance contractors, vandalism still went on. He said Shell adjusted the strategies from area to area depending on their circumstance. He said Ogoni where Shell was no longer doing oil business has 350 community surveillance workers paid every month.
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