Introduction: A Confession Before We Begin
I have a confession to make before this article begins.
For longer than I care to admit, I was performing only one letter of my profession. I called myself an HSE officer with full chest, certificate framed somewhere, signature confident on every inspection sheet. The confidence was real. The competence, it turned out, had a perimeter. If you had stopped me mid-shift and asked what NESREA stood for without warning, I would have stammered, and if you had pulled out the Environmental Impact Assessment Act and asked which sections governed the operations I was being paid to oversee, I would have asked for a minute, then quietly gone to Google.
I was the S officer. I performed the S officer’s role with conviction, and I had quietly outsourced the H and the E to other people, or to no one at all.
What changed was not a single moment but a slow accumulation of being in rooms, especially climate tech rooms, where the full profession was assumed rather than performed, where the people doing the work knew their environmental instruments the way I knew my hierarchy of controls, and where sustainability was not a hashtag at the end of a LinkedIn post but the actual substance of the work. I sat in those rooms long enough to realise that I was not under-qualified by design. I was under-qualified by choice.
That is what this article is about. The letters we are leaving on the floor, and the version of ourselves we are leaving with them.
Meet SHE
Let me introduce her properly, because I think we have spent so long calling her by her first initial that we have forgotten she has a full name.
SHE is Safety, Health, Environment: three letters that, when held together in one professional identity, produce something formidable. SHE is the architect of every safe trip home, the keeper of every workforce that has not yet been quietly broken by what it does for a living, and the steward of the ground, the water, and the air that the next generation will inherit from our industry. SHE is the reason a worker’s children still have a father at dinner, the reason a community still has a river that runs clean, and the reason a company’s name stays off a tribunal’s docket.
When SHE walks into a room fully dressed, the room shifts. Procurement listens. Operations slows down. Finance, however reluctantly, opens a line item, and the CEO who has been treating safety as an irritant remembers, briefly, that lives are on the line and so is the company’s social licence.
But she so rarely walks into the room fully dressed. We keep meeting her in fragments: a hard hat here, a toolbox talk there, a mental health flyer in February, an environmental statement nobody reads in the annual report. We have spent so long introducing her by her first initial that most of the industry has forgotten the rest of her name, and that is not her failure. That is ours.
The Half-Dressed Officer
You know him. I have been him.
He is fluent in Safety the way some men are fluent in football statistics, able to recite the hierarchy of controls in his sleep, confident in his PPE matrix, running his toolbox talks with the cadence of a Sunday preacher whose sign-in sheets are immaculate and whose near-miss board is updated weekly, sometimes daily when audit season approaches. If you ask him about lockout-tagout, scaffolding inspections, or confined space entry, he will give you a small lecture you did not ask for and walk away pleased with himself.
Put occupational noise-induced hearing loss in front of him, the actual audiometric data from the workers on his site, and his fluency dries up. Ask him which NESREA regulations apply to the effluent his facility discharges into the nearest waterway, and he will give you a look that politely suggests this is someone else’s department. Ask him what his company’s Scope 1 emissions are doing, and whether the operations he is overseeing are contributing to a climate liability that will land on his employer’s books within five years, and watch him pretend his radio just crackled.
He is not a bad officer. He is simply working with one letter of a three-letter mandate, and the letters he is missing are the ones the profession increasingly cannot function without. He has built an entire career on one third of his job description and convinced himself, with the quiet help of an industry that asked no more of him, that this is enough. The paperwork agrees with him, the KPIs agree with him, and the incident statistics, shaped by whatever pressures shaped them, agree with him. The profession does not agree with him. The profession is waiting for the rest of him to show up.
The Content-Day Officer
If the half-dressed officer ignores H, the content-day officer does something almost more insulting: he performs it on schedule.
October arrives, and so does the World Mental Health Day post. A nice graphic, usually borrowed from somewhere, with the company logo carefully placed in the corner and a caption about how mental health matters, rounded off with a few hashtags. Somewhere in a meeting room, a manager nods and marks it done. By the second week of October, the post is buried under quarterly results and project updates, and the workers who actually carry the mental load of the operation — who have not slept a full night in three weeks and who are watching colleagues burn out around them — have heard nothing from anyone in HSE about what is actually available to them.
May arrives, and so does the World No Tobacco Day toolbox talk: a printout, maybe a video, workers nodding through it, nobody asking whether there is any follow-up structure for the men who have been smoking through twelve-hour shifts for fifteen years because the work is that stressful and the support is that thin. December brings a flyer about HIV awareness and sometimes free testing if the budget allows, followed by silence until next December.
Health, for too many HSE officers, is a content calendar rather than a competency: a series of awareness days that allow us to claim we addressed the H without ever building the systems that would actually address it — including occupational health surveillance, mental health support that is more than a phone number on a poster, ergonomic assessments, heat stress protocols on sites where ambient temperatures regularly exceed forty degrees, and long-term exposure tracking for the kinds of slow injuries that do not show up until a worker is sixty and wondering why his hands no longer work. That is what H actually is: not a flyer, not a Wednesday in October, but a discipline, and most of us, if we are honest, have not done the reading.
The Missing E
If S is overperformed and H is costumed, E is, for the average HSE officer in Nigeria, simply absent.
I want to say this with the affection of someone who was, until recently, exactly this kind of officer. Most of us cannot speak fluently to environmental compliance because nobody taught us to, and the systems around us did not require it. The NEBOSH IGC gives E a respectful nod and moves on, our employers treat the environmental function as something for a separate consultant or for the EHS manager three levels up or for nobody at all, and the site-level HSE officer is rarely expected to know which Act governs what, so the site-level HSE officer rarely does. This is more pronounced in some sectors than others: in large oil and gas companies, dedicated environmental specialists carry much of this load, and the site HSE officer may never be expected to touch it. In construction, manufacturing, and mid-sized operations without that specialist layer, the gap sits squarely in the HSE officer’s lap, whether they know it or not.
But the instruments exist, and they are not hiding. The Environmental Impact Assessment Act, originally promulgated as Decree 86 of 1992 and codified as CAP E12 of the Laws of the Federation 2004, governs the assessment of any project likely to have a significant effect on the environment, and if your operations triggered an EIA, that document is sitting somewhere and you should have read it. Most HSE officers have not. The National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency, established by the NESREA (Establishment) Act of 2007, is the principal federal regulator for environmental standards outside the oil and gas sector, and it has issued specific regulations on noise, air quality, effluent discharge, hazardous waste management, and a long list of other domains that touch operations directly. The regulations are public, the enforcement is real even if uneven, and treating NESREA as somebody else’s problem is treating your own job as somebody else’s problem.
The Climate Change Act of 2021 created the National Council on Climate Change and set Nigeria on a pathway toward net-zero between 2050 and 2070, while also imposing obligations on private entities of a certain size to designate climate change officers and develop carbon emissions reduction action plans. If you work for a large emitter and cannot speak to your organisation’s obligations under that Act, you are working blind in a domain that is rapidly becoming a board-level concern. For those in oil and gas, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission and the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, both established under the Petroleum Industry Act of 2021, carry environmental mandates that reach directly into operational compliance, covering gas flaring reduction, oil spill response, decommissioning, and host community environmental obligations that are not abstractions but line items in your day.
And then there is the wider universe that is now coming for us all whether we are ready or not: the IFRS S2 climate-related disclosures issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board, the Global Reporting Initiative standards, and the increasing pressure from international financiers and offtakers who will not put their money or their reputations next to companies that cannot account for their environmental footprint. Sustainability is no longer a public relations function. It is a financing function, a market access function, and increasingly a survival function, which means the HSE officer who cannot speak to any of this is not under-qualified in the ordinary sense. They are unprepared for the profession that is actively forming around them.
The Integrated SHE
So what does SHE look like when she is finally allowed to be all of herself?
She is fluent in occupational health beyond the first aid kit, comfortable with the actual surveillance frameworks, the actual exposure tracking, and the actual mental health architecture a workforce needs. She is conversant in environmental compliance the way she is conversant in safety standards, able to cite the relevant Act in the same breath she cites the relevant ISO, and she reads her organisation’s sustainability disclosures, or insists that they be written if they are not. She can sit in a boardroom and explain why the company’s environmental exposure is also its financial exposure, and she does so without flinching.
She is also, increasingly, technologically literate, because IoT-enabled gas detectors, wearable fatigue monitors, AI-assisted incident analysis, and digital permit-to-work systems are not future-tense items in a vendor brochure but present-tense tools that are reshaping what the function can actually do, and the officer who refuses to engage with them is choosing to remain the officer of the previous decade. And she is audit-ready, not as a panic state in the week before the inspector arrives, but as a posture, so that when an auditor walks in unannounced her documentation is already in order, her records already reconcile, and she walks them through the site without breaking a sweat.
This is not an idealised officer. This is a reachable one, and here is the part I want to say plainly because I owe it to anyone reading this who is feeling the weight of how far they would have to travel to become her. I work in climate tech now, and I sit in rooms where this integrated officer is not an aspiration but a baseline, and before I sat in those rooms the gap between where I was and where I needed to be felt impossible. Certifications cost money I had to think hard about spending, time for upskilling had to be carved out of a life that was already full, and the instruments and frameworks I needed to learn felt like a second language I was being asked to acquire after hours, without a teacher, while still doing the day job.
What I want you to know is that the gap closes. It begins with a decision, and the decision is smaller than it looks. The Climate Change Act 2021 is freely available online, NESREA’s regulations are published, and the IFRS Foundation has free reading on S2. There are open courses on sustainability reporting, on environmental management systems, and on the integration of ESG into operational practice that cost nothing but attention, while the certifications come when you can afford them and the knowledge comes the moment you decide it should.
The first steps are more concrete than they sound. Find your organisation’s EIA if one exists and read the sections that touch your operations. Pull up the NESREA regulations for your sector and identify which ones apply to your site. Complete one short course on occupational health surveillance, even a free one, because the vocabulary alone will change how you read your own reports. Ask, in the next meeting where it is relevant, what your organisation’s position is on climate-related disclosure. None of these actions require a new qualification or a budget line. They require the decision to treat the full name of your profession as an instruction rather than a title.
That is how SHE gets dressed: one letter at a time, one decision at a time, one free document at a time, until one day you walk into a room and realise you are no longer half of yourself.
The Profession She Was Always Meant to Be
I want to close by saying something to the person reading this who is doing the slow internal arithmetic of how much of themselves they have been leaving at the door.
You are not late, and you are not behind, and you are not a fraud for having performed only one letter for longer than you would like to admit, because the profession was set up in a way that allowed this, the training pipelines reinforced it, the employers rewarded it, and the industry has been calling SHE by her first initial for so long that most of us inherited the habit without ever choosing it.
But you are choosing now. The fact that you have read this far is the choice already beginning, and the next document you open, the next regulation you actually read, the next time you ask a question about occupational health that goes beyond a flyer, and the next time you raise a hand in a meeting and ask what the company’s environmental position is: in all of those moments you are introducing SHE properly, walking her into the room with her full name.
This is the profession she was always meant to be. Not a clipboard, not a costume, not a one-letter performance, but a full identity held together by a person who understood that safety without health is incomplete, that health without environment is myopic, and that the three together are formidable in a way that no single letter could ever be.
So let this be the line you carry from here: SHE has a full name. Use all of it, on your site, in your reports, in the language you bring to your meetings, in the standards you refuse to lower, in the documents you finally open this week. Use it when you are tired, use it when nobody is watching, and use it especially when the room is treating her like she only has one initial, because the room is wrong and you now know it.
The profession deserves better than the one letter we keep performing. So do you.