The Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA); Dr. Dakuku Peterside has said that anyone criticising the agency over its seafarers development scheme; Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) clearly lacks information.
Peterside stated this at a recent event organised by the agency in Lagos, saying that Nigeria does not have qualified seafarers to work aboard big vessels of 5,000 gross tonnage and above and vessels with equivalent of 5,000 kilowatts engine and above.
He said that this was what necessitated the setting up of the NSDP in order to cushion the gap of inadequacy of the country in producing qualified man power.
"In the area of capacity building, apart from several other initiatives, the one that is very prominent and dear to me is the Nigeria Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP) many persons have criticised it because of lack of information, if they are informed, perhaps they would respond differently"
"We realised that we don't have many Nigerians on ocean going vessels of 5,000 Gross Tonnage and above or 5,000 kilowatt engine and above, the local Cabotage Vessels have Nigerians but when we talk about big vessels of 5000 gross tonnage and above, we don't have Nigerians and these are the areas that we really have money to make"
"So as an intervention programme we sent our students to various citadel of learning around the world, right now a number of them are already engaged"
"We are also building capacity in house for our people, as regulators, if we are not in tune with current development I don't know what we are going to regulate", he said.
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