The General Manager, Nigerian Agip Oil Exploration, Mr. Richard Ogunde, on Friday in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State said Nigeria�s oil reserve had only 43 years to dry up.
The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Ogunde made the disclosure in a lecture at the Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijagun, Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State. Quoting from the latest World oil data, Ogunde said Nigeria�s reserve remained 36.2 billion barrels.
He said in the lecture, titled �Petroleum Exploration, The Economy and Science Education,� that Nigeria had a yearly oil production capacity of 2.3bn barrels.
The oil expert advised government to start looking for other oil reserves. He urged the Federal Government to seek other means of sustenance after oil might have disappeared, �especially now that we have abandoned agriculture.�
The geophysicist accused successive governments of conniving with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to misdirect, mismanage and mis-apply the country�s oil revenue without commensurate infrastructure growth. He criticised the NNPC for engaging in the direct sale of petroleum products by setting up retail outlets in different parts of the country.
Ogunde, who said that Nigeria had remained �poor despite our being rich in oil dollars simply because some people are just habitual bad managers of the nation�s resources,� regretted that the country still suffered from poor energy supply after the exploration of oil for over five decades.
He said, �Unfortunately, if there is no electricity, you cannot develop infrastructure. When a nation fails to develop her infrastructure, there is no way her economy can grow.� He also described the graduates of oil-related courses from the Nigerian universities as �half-baked and unemployable.�
NAN quotes him as saying that many of the job-seeking graduates of Geology and Geophysics with high-class degrees did not even understand simple practical terms in oil exploration and processing. He said, �The situation was so bad that when I interviewed well over 200 of these so-called brilliant geologists and geophysicists, I found less than 10 of them worthy of consideration.�
Ogunde expressed regrets that his findings had also revealed that more than 99 per cent of the graduates were not ready to meet the difficult challenges existing in the oil industry, warning that �the sector does not have room for layabouts who professed to be super-graduates.�