To assuage the strong concerns of oil producing communities in Nigeria’s oil rich Niger Delta, the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo initiated the Local Content Policy for Nigeria to increase local capacity and participation in the petroleum industry. The Obasanjo government needed to achieve the objective by ensuring that a substantial portion of the activities in the oil and gas sector, which is the mainstay of Nigerian economy, were carried out in the country by Nigerian companies and Nigerian workers.

As it is currently, more than 70 percent of the jobs in the oil and gas sector are still carried out by foreigners, an action, which is contrary to the local content policy of the Nigerian government. At a time, stakeholders in the industry argued that government was not serious in attempting to stop this act of 'cheating', as it could not lobby the National Assembly to sign the Local Content Bill into law. Many described it as an aberration that such a bill that is geared towards improving indigenous participation in the oil and gas industry, after many years that it was initiated, has not been passed into law. Even the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) at a point warned that it will no longer be acceptable for oil companies that operate in Nigeria and derive enormous revenue from the country to hide under convenient excuses to export Rig Shipyard/Shut-down Repairs & Maintenance to other countries, a threat which the oil companies did not take seriously as they continued to take the bulk of their works to foreign countries, because they have no confident in the ability of Nigerian companies to handle such jobs. Experts in the industry estimate that Nigerian content in the oil and gas sector is around 40%, which indicate that most white-collar jobs such as engineering, material and maintenance work are provided by foreign