Covid-19: We gained, lost in pandemic – Prof. Ezigbo

Thu, Apr 1, 2021
By editor
2 MIN READ

Economy

By Benprince Ezeh

PROF. Joseph Ezigbo, managing director, Falcon Corporation Limited, has said that the oil and gas sector gained and lost during the pandemic.

Ezigbo told Realnews in an exclusive interview in Lagos that now “we sit down here and have meetings. Pandemic has done well, it has thought us a few things”.

“Let’s even start from the workforce. We’ve learned that you don’t have to travel to Houston all the time to get agreements signed. You see, if we are not lazy people, the lesson would have been complete. But we are very lazy people. Lazy in the sense that, now, some people don’t go to work, but they get paid their salaries because they are supposed to work from home. But are they actually at home working? The answer is no.

“Have they learned their lessons? The answer is no. They haven’t. So on those angles, we’ve lost. Some physical things that need to be done with some people there have reduced.

“Yes, they have reduced because they say the fear of COVID-19 is the beginning of wisdom. So a lot of people are afraid,” he said.

According to him, the nation has also lost as well. “From that angle, we lost as well. At the beginning, at the heat of COVID-19, particularly in my own case, most of the factories I supply gas were shut down. Most of them were no longer using gas.

“We had surplus gas. People were not using gas, so the economy was suffering because, in Nigeria, 95% of our economy is based on oil and gas, which is terrible.

“This made us lose so much in revenue, trillions of naira of course, because if you look at it this way, most countries slowed down in production completely and that meant energy utilization also slowed down. They were times we had LNG vessels out there, but there was nobody to buy,” Ezigbo said.

– Apr. 01, 2021 @ 17:42 GMT

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