Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Nige­ria, Africa's largest oil pro­duc­er, has com­mit­ted to send­ing more of its youths to T&T to ac­quire train­ing in the oil and gas in­dus­try. This was re­vealed yes­ter­day by Nige­ria's Pres­i­dent Dr Good­luck Ebele Jonathan as he at­tend­ed a train­ing func­tion for Niger­ian youths at the Na­tion­al Skills Cen­tre in Cou­va. It was the third func­tion which Jonathan at­tend­ed since he start­ed his of­fi­cial State vis­it on Tues­day.

The event was host­ed by Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Fazal Karim, who com­mend­ed 70 Niger­ian na­tion­als cur­rent­ly be­ing trained at NESC in the fields of au­to­mo­tive ser­vices, in­dus­tri­al me­chan­i­cal main­te­nance, shield­ed met­al arc weld­ing and heavy equip­ment crane op­er­a­tions.

Coin­ing the term "Tringe­ria" (a mix of Trin­ba­go and Nige­ria), Karim said 57 Niger­ian na­tion­als have al­ready re­ceived cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from NESC. "Through our Tringe­ria pro­gramme, NESC can give tal­ent and skills to help trainees of Nige­ria," Karim said. He gave the com­mit­ment that all na­tion­al train­ing agen­cies will be made avail­able to the Niger­ian peo­ple.

"I be­lieve that eman­ci­pa­tion through ed­u­ca­tion will change a na­tion. I want to make Niger­ian stu­dents com­fort­able dur­ing their pe­ri­od of train­ing," Karim said. He added that even though T&T was small in size, it played a sig­nif­i­cant role on the world's petro­chem­i­cal stage.

"We have achieved much in half a cen­tu­ry but there is still much to be done pow­ered by our in­valu­able hu­man re­source and sound lead­er­ship," Karim said. He not­ed that Nige­ria shared sim­i­lar ideals as T&T and recog­nised that ed­u­ca­tion and de­vel­op­ment of hu­man cap­i­tal was the on­ly way for­ward.

Karim said over the past two years, T&T strength­ened ties with Nige­ria through its tech­ni­cal/vo­ca­tion­al train­ing pro­grammes which were made avail­able to Niger­ian na­tion­als. How­ev­er, he called on the Niger­ian Gov­ern­ment to as­sist in con­struct­ing a dor­mi­to­ry for Niger­ian stu­dents dur­ing their study pe­ri­od. "Not on­ly is ed­u­ca­tion im­por­tant but there must be safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty as well and we wish to of­fer them a home away from home," Karim said.

Mean­while, Pres­i­dent Jonathan com­mend­ed Karim for his pro­pos­als on train­ing. He said Karim ex­ud­ed pas­sion and in­ter­est in de­vel­op­ing strong ties with the Niger­ian and T&T peo­ples. "Thank you for ac­cept­ing our stu­dents to train. You are not just in­ter­est­ed in train­ing them but you have the pas­sion and in­ter­est to make sure that they are trained to play a key role in the oil in­dus­try," Jonathan said.

He urged the Niger­ian pupils to take ad­van­tage of their op­por­tu­ni­ty and to un­der­take lead­er­ship po­si­tions. "You must be ed­u­cat­ed in dif­fer­ent as­pects of our econ­o­my. Gas tech­nol­o­gy is high and they have in­sti­tu­tions here to train us. What we must do is to em­brace sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to rule the world." Jonathan said T&T na­tion­als were well skilled to con­tribute to the de­vel­op­ment of Nige­ria's oil and gas sec­tor.

Mean­while Ju­nior Min­is­ter of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Rudranath In­dars­ingh said that T&T's Gov­ern­ment was ready to deep­en fra­ter­nal and bi­lat­er­al ties with Nige­ria. He said T&T and Nige­ria shared a deep his­tor­i­cal link that must con­tin­ue well in­to the fu­ture.