Kenya imports welders and coaters from Nigeria, South Africa, Lebanon and China to build our pipelines. Lack of requisite skills for the oil and gas sector remains a major challenge as the country prepares to exploit newfound resources.
We must, therefore, moot sector strategies and programmes and that is why a focused and sustained public discussion on the opportunities and challenges that come with the discovery of oil and gas reserves must begin now. Public lectures are one such avenue through which the government, private sector, donors, the international community and, above all, Kenyans, can be empowered with the right information. This will help the country and the region to avoid the resource curse, whereby rising revenues lead to instability, poverty and corruption.
With this glaring skills gap, how do we prudently utilise the oil and gas resources? How does Kenya position herself strategically for economic prosperity? The KPC has set up the Morendat Centre of Excellence for Oil & Gas Pipelines to develop human resource capacity for partner states in oil and gas pipelines management, operations and maintenance to reduce dependence on expatriate workers.
The Naivasha-based institute is designed to save on costs incurred hiring foreign experts. It will draw students from eastern Africa with a view to building local capacity for future oil and gas assignments. The KPC spends more than Sh3.6 million per month to import manpower from as far away as Nigeria and South Africa to weld and coat the ongoing Mombasa–Nairobi pipeline alone.
The institute is a brainchild of the heads of state of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan. During the Third Heads of State Summit in Kigali, Rwanda, on October, 28, 2013, member states agreed that Centres of Excellence for capacity building be created to support the Northern Corridor Integration Projects.
Among the centres proposed was KPC’s Morendat Training and Conference Centre. It is the only such institution in East Africa and the third in Africa after Sonatrach in Algeria and Transnet in South Africa. The Morendat Centre of Excellence will offer competence-based technical courses in pipeline maintenance, project management, pipeline technology, operations, safety, quality control and legal and regulatory frameworks.
The KPC is the only white pipeline operator in the region with over 1,300km of pipeline network. As the region embarks on large-scale oil and gas exploitation, experts estimate that more than 2,700km of pipeline will be developed to coincide with this significant growth. This will require more than 2,500 technicians, up from the 700 in the region, all of whom work in the KPC. These are the demand dynamics and strategic institutional linkages that the Centre of Excellence will address. The institution opens its doors next month.
For many years, the skills gap has denied Kenya several mega projects, with most of our young people confined to menial labour. Despite the fact that Kenya has the most educated population in the region, unemployment is high. Some companies struggle to hire adequate qualified talent. Our new school will not only prepare our young people for the future, it will also build local content in the neigbouring countries. This will help them to manage, operate and maintain oil and gas pipelines and reduce dependence on expatriate labour.
The writer is the Managing Director of Kenya Pipeline Company Ltd