The discovery of oil in Ghana imposes enormous challenges on the country’s universities and polytechnics to train the human resource needed in the industry, Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah, the Chairman of the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), has noted.

He said there was the need to train a wide range of experts, including petrol-chemical and electrical engineers, pure chemists, mathematicians, geologists, physicists, technicians, safety officers and environmental scientists to operate in the industry.

The former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana and Chemistry Professor was sharing his thoughts with the Daily Graphic on the training of graduates to take advantage of the country's emerging oil industry.

"Apart from the small number of engineers and technicians who will be doing the drilling and extraction, there are a whole lot of other areas that we need to cover. We have to sit down and study those areas”, he remarked.

"The unfortunate thing in this country is that we've not been good at manpower projections. So we keep on training people without necessarily knowing whether they are required or not. I hope that this time we are not going to train people just for the sake of training," he added.

Prof. Addae-Mensah urged the tertiary institutions to develop programmes to meet such national needs, while asking the government to provide the necessary infrastructural facilities and equipment to enable the training institutions to deliver on their mandate.

Since the news about Ghana's discovery of oil was broken to the public last year, there has been great excitement across the country as many Ghanaians relish the economic gains the oil find is likely to bring to the nation.

The critical challenge, that the discovery of what is termed "black gold" poses, however, is whether or not the country is ready to embrace the highly booming but equally troubled oil industry.

At the moment, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the University of Ghana and the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) in Tarkwa are the only institutions that train graduates for some sectors in the petroleum industry, particularly the refinery sector.

However, the scope of the petroleum-related programmes being run by those institutions and the number of people who graduate from them, are not enough to meet the demands of the oil industry.

Prof. Addae-Mensah was of the belief that the nation must gird its loins on all fronts by training experts and middle-level manpower for the industry in order to meet the challenges ahead.

He urged the polytechnics to work seriously at training middle-level manpower, such as technicians, for the industry.

He said the oil discovery vindicated the constant call on the government, especially by members of academia, to make science and technology a priority for the country's development.

He was, however, not happy with the commitment of governments to that call, citing the frequent attachment of the science and technology sectors to other ministries during ministerial reshuffles.

"No country has ever developed without paying serious attention to science and technology. Now we are faced with the harsh reality of the situation," he pointed out in reference to the oil discovery.

Prof. Addae-Mensah urged the government to invest more in science and technology and endeavour to create a scientific awareness among the populace.

He said the universities were e ill-equipped with laboratory facilities and equipment, making the training of science graduates very difficult. He said that difficulty, coupled with high school fees and low income of science graduates, discouraged many students from pursuing science programmes at the universities.

Nevertheless, he encouraged students to pursue science and petroleum-related programmes, giving the assurance that the emerging oil industry would be rewarding to them.

Prof. Addae-Mensah said there was the need to make the training of science and technology attractive to entice brilliant students to pursue those programmes. He underlined the need for the government to take medium and long-term measures, such as the establishment of more oil refineries, to take full advantage of the industry.


Source: Daily Graphic