The Ports and Terminal Management Academy of Nigeria (POTEMAN) has called on the Minister of Transportation, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi? to carry out human capital audit of the Nigerian maritime sector.
?Registrar of POTEMAN, Dr. Babatunde Samuel in a chat with Shipping Position Daily last week said that a human capital audit will enable government to know how many training institutions are in the sector and the level of capacity they are building in the students.
The audit will also allow the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) to have a record of seafarers in the country and the number of cadets churned out by the? maritime academies, both private and government-owned.
Babatunde also urged NIMASA to come out with a template of what privately-established academies should operate with. Speaking on the backdrop of a list of compliant academies published by NIMASA last year, he said many of the private academies were politically licensed by NIMASA.
?"Let the government carry out human capital auditing in the maritime sector. By this, we look at core elements in competences, the people carrying out the training, are they qualified? most of them have not undergone structural training to enable them teach the subjects they are teaching?", he said
"I don't know if it is NIMASA that is classifying an institution as a mushroom academy, but one thing I want to challenge the people in authority is to give us a blueprint of what an ideal academy should be like, NIMASA should do that"
"Most of the academies that were given license by NIMASA to operate, if we should go and re-evaluate the audit, you will find out that none of them qualified in the first place"
"That I train cadets does not mean I need approval of NIMASA, on-board the ship there are various activities?. To have the practical is when you go to the sea, if the universities are teaching maritime transport and they are not situated beside water, where did they get their experience." Babatunde argued.
He maintained that training of cadets does not necessarily require the academy to be situated beside by the sea, according to him, there are different departments of training, such as engineering, the stewards, deck officers and the artisans.
The POTEMAN Registrar also expressed concerns about the fate of the 2, 259 cadets that? are undergoing training abroad under the National Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) of NIMASA.
Babatunde said many of them will return to Nigeria and end up being security guards, messengers, freight forwarders and so on. He pointed out that there was no vessel to absolve the cadets for sea time training.
"The 2000 cadets sent abroad by NIMASA to train abroad, if they come back, where is the vessel you are going to place them on? We don't have a national carrier and we cannot force the foreign vessels because the Cabotage Law and Local Content laws do not cover such provision"
"I can assure you that thousands of these cadets when they return back will end being security guards, some if fortunate will end up in the freight forwarding or some other industries, so we should stop deceiving ourselves".
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