Director General of Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safely Agency (NIMASA) Dr. Dakuku Peterside last week disclosed that it has established a satellite surveillance control and command center, even as he expressed worry over soaring cases of piracy on the nation’s waterways.
Dr. Peterside said this at a breakfast session with maritime journalists in Lagos, even as he added that the centre has coverage of up to 312 nautical miles from coast line (approximately 100 nautical miles off Nigeria’s Exclusive Economic Zone).
He informed that the satellite system can detect vessels with AIS transponders switched off as a synthetic aperture raider (SAR images which can be interrogated) immediately by near – point of sight patrol / enforcement boats.
The NIMASA DG also disclosed that the agency has reactivated the maritime domain awareness capability. “This has enabled effective enforcement of regulations. Our surveillance system enables us to ensure the preservation of Cabotage Trade for indigenous operators by identifying and differentiating Ship-To-Ship (STS) operations that take place at the secured anchorage and offshore locations from Cabotage Trade to avoid foreign domination in Cabotage trade under the guise of STS”, he explained.
According to him, “in the last six months, a total of 1,685 tanker operations were captured by the Satellite Surveillance System. Of these operations, 284 were carried out at the anchorage area through lightering”
“Effectively, through surveillance guided enforcement operations, the 284 tankers that were lightened at the anchorage were hindered from participating in Cabotage operations”.
The NIMASA DG, who also acknowledged that it is the primary responsibility of the agency to ensure that vessels that call at the nation’s seaports are safe, however assured that piracy would soon reduce.
He said: “We are concerned about cases of piracy within our waterways, but, NIMASA working through the maritime command has improved and increased surveillance within our waterways. We are working with our partners in the Nigerian Navy who have designed a number of special programmes to patrol waterways especially in the Niger-Delta.
“We have also reactivated our maritime domain awareness, our satellite view which give us the view of the entire maritime space, the challenge is building the capacity to respond, but today when you come to NIMASA you will see all that is going on within our maritime space. We are working very hard to build capacity and we will acquire fast intervention vessels, fast intervention or maritime security helicopter or even special mission aircraft.
“We are working closely to train a new set of military men because we are not allowed to bear arms, and retrain them on maritime security, surveillance in particular, and we hope that in the next four months, we will see lot of changes in maritime security. We are working hard to reduce piracy to the barest minimum on the number of pirate cases on our waterways”.
On the level of compliance to the International Ships and Ports Security Code (ISPS) code, Peterside said that NIMASA has recorded 80 percent compliance.
Acknowledging that, “the primary responsibility of NIMASA is to ensure ships calling at our ports are safe and secured, he added that, “we do under two principal programmes, ISPS code programme and NIMASA maritime security strategy, i.e. the total spectrum of maritime security strategy, but what we are doing is that we have grown compliance from 13 percent at various times to 80 percent. We also ensure port facilities adhere to ISPs code, and we have been commended by Department of Transport of United Kingdom and United State Coast Guard. We have received commendation from these two major international partners”.
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