The Dark Side of Nigerianization: How National Oil Companies Undermine Human Capital Development in Niger Delta

Nigeria’s Local Content Act (LCA, 2010) promised to convert hydrocarbon wealth into indigenous technological capacity, high-skill employment and equitable wages in the Niger Delta. A decade later, youth unemployment, skills obsolescence and labour casualization remain stubbornly high around export terminals operated by Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited and its joint-venture (JV) partners. Extant scholarship measures local-content compliance in terms of contract volume rather than human-capital value-added; consequently, the mechanisms through which “Nigerianization” undermines career progression, wage growth and skill formation are under-studied. This article deploys a mixed-methods critical-realist design to fill the gap. Quantitatively, we construct a unique panel of 1 867 Niger Delta oil-field workers (2010-2021) and find that, ceteris paribus, employment under fully Nigerian-owned service contractors is associated with 34 % lower real wage growth and 41 % fewer certified training days relative to expatriate-led firms. Qualitatively, 62 semi-structured interviews with welders, geoscientists, community contractors and regulators reveal three causal pathways: (1) political-racial capture that diverts training budgets to non-technical “community liaison” roles; (2) oligopolistic subcontracting that compresses wage ladders; and (3) asset-specific investment clauses that penalize workforce upskilling. The findings challenge the human-capital optimism embedded in resource-nationalist policy and call for re-anchoring local-content metrics to wage trajectories, training intensity and unionization rights rather than nominal equity share.