Mkgeorge Onyung is the President Ship Owners Association of Nigeria. In this interview with Oluyinka Onigbinde, he speaks extensively on the state of the maritime industry in Nigeria and sundry issues.
What’s your assessment of the maritime industry in the last three quarters of this year?
My assessment of the maritime industry is hard, because the industry started many years before I was born, if we go by independence, we are talking about 60 years and I still found out that we have made very slow progress for the maritime industry, we have made slow progress because we have not advanced the way we should, and then we can look back and give all kinds of complaints and of course any excuse that is available is now made perfect with this, so anybody can give an excuse now but my assessment of the maritime industry is that we can do better; there are so many areas that are yet untapped. I start from my constituency in the area of ship acquisition and ship ownership and domestic and international shipping trade and you know we are playing in the biggest industry in the world, when I say we haven’t done well, it means that we are slow compared to what is happening globally, in terms of ship ownership we are less than 0.01 percent, so if you look at the parameters they go the same way. But I am not here to compare, but I am saying we have to improve, we have to look at the finish line, what is the medal we are going for, the medal we are going for is an industry that makes $16 billion a day and $6 trillion a year, so if you now check $16 billion a day that means $980 million per hour and if you move it again to minute it is $11 million per minute, that’s the price of maritime in the world every year. So if we are in this business, we must think big, aspire and persevere to catch up and this is the time because we can cry about COVID. I am a physician; I know what COVID 19 has done to the world, but we have to dust up and get ourselves up, there is nothing wrong with falling, but if you failed to get yourself up it means you have really failed, so we need to dust up and go to those areas , there are so many areas to look at, the United Nations in their wisdom have proclaimed that by the year 2030 nobody will be sick, and that nobody will be hungry, what that means is that the maritime sector, the blue economy have the capacity to feed the whole world and to be able to make the whole world rich, all we have to do is to harness the resources of the maritime industry. So, when you talk about an assessment of the industry, it is huge we have not touch fishing, tourism, aqua culture, we have not touched ship repairs, ship building, renewable energy, even though we have scratched all these surfaces, the deep money is coming in from these activities, so if we put our mind to it and desire to get square pegs in square holes, then of course we are going to get going.
Having said that, what will you say are the bottlenecks inhibiting the realization of these great opportunities in the blue economy?
I am glad you said bottlenecks otherwise other people call it challenges, the bottlenecks is, first of all what I call maritime blindness, by maritime blindness I mean that from my perspective as the president of Ship owners, I have looked at the maritime industry, I have tried to gain a lot of knowledge and in the process, I have found that where I am now and where I was before have projected me from the multitude that are maritime illiterates, I am sorry to use that word, but the truth of the matter is that 13% only of the world understand and know maritime industry, so 87% are maritime illiterates, what propelled me to do that is, when I looked at the medical profession, the medical profession says that 17% of the world are medically literate whereas 83% of the world are medical illiterate, so my greatest bottleneck is that anybody who is serious about the maritime industry should learn about the industry. I already analyzed how big and lucrative the industry can be, but we must understand that if you want to win a gold medal, you must develop some muscles’ if that’s what it takes and some serious practice; same thing in maritime, we need to strategize, we need to talk among ourselves and work the talk, right now, it is an industry, people have done very well in other climes, and there are so many sectors that are very lucrative. For example, in the Philippines, during the COVID, they had to take census of all their seafarers in the world and what they found was shocking, that they have the highest number of seafarers in the world and they found 400,000 seafarers and when they check in terms of revenue the Philippines government makes $6 billion a year. So we have all the technology all we have to do is to focus and concentrate and of course, have the requisite knowledge, of course nobody was born with maritime in his head, even if you are a marine engineer or captain you cannot know everything, you seek help and that’s why we talk about collaboration in the ship owners’ association of Nigeria. I have extended the olive branch to all facets of all those that are going to the ocean, even other ship owners association, we are now one; we speak the same language because whatever happens in the ocean affects everybody the same way, so there is no division among us, I can say that categorically and we talk together, now we are seeing a lot of changes, so the bottlenecks are there, but again there are slow progress in various areas.
You talked about the Philippines seafarers and how much they generate for the country in a year, but in Nigeria our seafarers are unemployed; even ship owners are discriminating against them, what is your reaction to this?
My reaction is; the problem is training, training and training, what kind of training do we have in Nigeria, we need to beef up our training. I am very proud of MAN Oron; they are taking meaningful strides, I have visited there myself and I want to beat my chest that about 56 cadets were trained in Nigeria on ship owners’ ships last year, it is not true that we are discriminating, the truth of the matter is that MAN Oron needs a lot of help, they need equipment and they need also to be upgraded to a level where they can do most of these things. Again the truth about this is that some of our ships are sophisticated, in the upstream oil industry some of our members own ships that are worth $105Million and all these are very sophisticated, what big ship owners will not do is to invest in high ticket transactions and buy sophisticated vessels and give it to people who are incompetent, and that is why we are very passionate about seafarers’ training, but we know that even abroad, there are some Nigerians that are on foreign ships, but they are not many because those ships must be flag of convenience, but if you go to the other maritime nations, you can’t find any Nigerian on a Norwegian or Greek ship. So the onus fall on us to also have our ships and that’s why we are clamoring, you know ship acquisition is not rocket science we can buy $100 million ship, $60 million ship or even $20 million ship, I can say this, but I don’t want to look as though I am blowing my trumpet; my company JeffCon Oil and Gas was the first company in the history of Nigeria that launched a brand new oil tanker in our waters in 2010, so what we are saying is that this brand new ships are all over the world and we can operate them, it is now to be able to remove the bottlenecks that exist.
NIMASA has set December 2020 for the phase-off of single haul vessels, how do you think this will affect the ship owners in your association?
Well, the SOAN that I head have tanker operators and most of our tankers are double haul, because don’t forget SOAN consist of genuine ship owners who have ships that are registered in Nigeria, the ships are registered in Nigeria and they are operated with good corporate governance and above the international best practices and maritime standard, they operate using the IMO standard and we are very strict about that. So if we are talking about single haul tankers, they are already phasing-out, maybe we have just pocket of one or two and those kind of people are not in our association and I think NIMASA will not have any problem enforcing it next month.
Despite the $195million Israeli contract for security on our waters, we still have piracy and sea robbery persistent on our waters, are you not perturbed about this?
It is not the big figures that will solve the problem, they can help, but as a matter of fact, yes we have heard about the contract, we’ve heard about the parties involved, the Israelis and all that, but we want to see it on the ground, we have not seen it yet. I know they have some bottlenecks and those bottlenecks come in different colours and sizes, they also affect the ministry of transportation and ship owners. So whatever is hindering this should be removed, you are right that some ship owners have gone bankrupt as a result of the activities of pirates on our waters, in the last seven months have had four calls from international ships that decided to seek help, I have to go to Escravos and some places where I tried to look at some of the community leaders and some of our members that are in those areas, to see how they can help by way of sharing of information to see how they can help them. I did not do it because I just wanted to do it, I did it because anytime a seafarer is kidnapped or have a problem, we ship owners take them as members of our family, so we do not play with.
Discussion about this post