The Minster of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachikwu,on Thursday asked financial institutions and stakeholders to support the expansion of the Nigerian Content Intervention Fund.
Kachikwu said that the fund would help to help some local Nigerian experts who wanted to invest in some areas but lacked sufficient funding.
“As small as the fund might be, 200 million dollars is to ginger everybody to begin to look at how to expand this fund.
“My goal for this fund is at least one billion dollars and not 200 million dollars.
“So once the fund is launched, we will work internally and first of all get BOI to also contribute its counterpart funding.
“I also expect the oil industry to begin to say how can we contribute; whether it is through deposit to BOI, to enable us to expand this pool of fund.
“I like to see investment drives that will bring in Foreign Direct Investments into this fund,“ he said.
“We must be careful to see that we have reasonable geographical spread in what we are doing, so that we don’t have one geographical entity benefiting from it; so the fund must go round, that is key.
“Secondly, I like to see this fund go to cutting edge technology driven businesses; we need to look for things that are not there as basic normal day to day activities.“
“The whole idea is for oil companies to identify within their own domain in the last five years, 10 companies that have worked with them and have capacity but lacked in certain things that can help them grow.
“The oil companies can help them grow by giving them adequate patronage, support, by getting training, some time providing certain technology that they can grow with.
“This industry will not grow by Nigerian company just struggling alone to grow, we have a moral responsibility as oil industry to help the companies grow.“
“NNPC has done a good job by bringing it down to 23, but that is not where we are heading; where we are heading is 15 per cent and is not 18.
“We must bring down cost of production; we must look at our OPEC brothers in the face and be able to compete adequately; oil companies must rise to the challenges of producing oil, so the target is 15, and we will achieve that.“
Support InfoStride News' Credible Journalism: Only credible journalism can guarantee a fair, accountable and transparent society, including democracy and government. It involves a lot of efforts and money. We need your support. Click here to Donate