The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Transportation, Dr. Magdalene Ajani, has charged the Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base, LADOL, to promote local content and youth employment in furtherance of the Federal Government policy on job creation.
Dr. Ajani made this known when she led a senior Management team to undertake an inspection tour of the LADOL Free Trade Zone, Lagos, which is one of the nation’s critical infrastructure in the Maritime, Oil & Gas sectors.
The Permanent Secretary who was impressed by the level of infrastructural development, particularly emphasised the need for the company and its partners to do everything possible to train and retain already-trained manpower in order to achieve local content consolidation.
Furthermore, she encouraged the company to continue to ensure that its policies and practices sufficiently affect the host communities in a positive manner in order to engender peace and inclusiveness.
The Managing Director, LADOL Free Trade Zone, Dr. Amy Jadesinmi, earlier highlighted the diverse new business lines being developed by the Free Zone and invited the Ministry to help highlight and market the Zones potentials in fabrication and innovation to its parastatals and stakeholders, particularly in the rail and maritime sectors.
She reiterated the objective of LADOL and Samsung to continue to contribute to the development of Nigeria’s economy through initiatives such as training of local manpower for the maritime/oil and gas sectors as well as in increasing local content capacity in the sectors.
“We also invested in training Nigerians to do the work…We compare very favourably internationally. Why? Because of all these investments; because of high local content; because most of the jobs are done by Nigerians”, she said.
In concluding, the MD, LADOL, thanked the Ministry’s team for the visit and assured that all the observations and suggestions would be acted upon in order to make LADOL achieve its vision of becoming a World-class brand – as already attested to by the various global certifications it has already received.
The highlight of the occasion was a guided tour of the premises including the heavy-duty fabrication and painting facilities within the Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI-MCI) Shipyard, which was then followed by an audio-visual presentation.
The inspection team, included the Ministry’s Director of Maritime Services, Babatunde Sule and the Director, Legal Services, Pius Oteh.
Dominica Nwabufo