Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA); Dr. Dakuku Peterside, has said that not less than 70% of vacancies on board Cabotage vessels have been filled by Nigerian seafarers.
Dr. Peterside who disclosed this on Thursday in an interview on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) programme; ‘Good Morning Nigeria’, also said that the remaining 30% slots are cases where there is need for specialized training.
He also maintained that the spaces that have not been filled are on board specialised vessels that are capital intensive assets that will take up to 5 to 10 years for someone to acquire the required training to be able to work on them.
Justifying what NIMASA has done so far, he explained that “today we have not less than 70% Nigerians on board Cabotage vessels. You can have a different opinion, but you can’t have alternative fact, let anybody challenge us”
“If you talk about manning, there are specialized skills that will take up to 5 to 10 years to acquire for you to go on board and operate in those specialized vessels. Now if you look at the remaining 30%, there cases where we have specialized cases where you need specialized training to go on board those vessels”.
Explaining further, Peterside said, “It costs between 50 to100million US Dollars to acquire very specialized vessels working in the (maritime) industry. Now with that type of assets, you will bring somebody who is not qualified to man such vessel and risk the assets, the vessels, the environment and human right”.
He also said that the issue of participations of Nigerians in shipping is receiving positive attention in accordance with the Cabotage Act adding that NIMASA is working with the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) to make some forecast for the sector.
“If you look at the issue of promotion and participation of Nigerians in shipping, which is also positive under the Cabotage Act. It is our mandate to ensure that Nigerians are on vessels and take the dominant role in our local trading”, he said.
Specifically, he disclosed that, “before 2015 we had 262 vessels registered under the Cabotage regime. Now that has increased to about 420-430 vessels; that is almost double in three years despite the fact that the economy was stagnated at a time”
“Now what we are getting right is that we have stepped up our compliance enforcement, what that means is that before now foreign vessels can just come in and leave, but now they cannot just come and leave, they are forced to patronize Nigerians”
So Nigerians are better patronized now than some years ago. We have also introduced what we call the New Cabotage Compliance Strategy. We have always had compliance enforcement; we have now rejigged our compliance enforcement”
“We are now working with the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board, now making some forecast of what we need in the industry in the next 2 to 3 years and say to the industry players that this is the type of vessels we need in the next two or three years”.
He maintained that the major work of the agency is to ensure that Nigerians are trained so that they can be able to man such vessels.
“We have told the oil industry that we will not allow any foreign vessel trade within our coastal water except in cases where no Nigeria has such vessel. We have put the oil and gas industry, industry players in the know. We put physical enforcement, so if you see any foreign vessel then you are up for trouble”.
Speaking on his achievement in the past three years, he said that the agency has ensured that there are more inspections on vessels coming into the country, adding that it has also ensured proper compliance by vessels trading on the nation’s coastal waters.
He also said that NIMASA has reduced the number of vessels that are being detained.
“We have also brought down the number of vessels that are detained, number of ships calling on our ports that are detained because they didn't meet up one of the conditions, that we have brought down, the number of inspections have gone up while the number of detentions have gone down. Which means that more vessels coming to our ports are more compliant? So we don't compromise our environment, and we don't compromise the safety of those who operate within our territorial waters”
“In terms of flag state inspection, meaning that vessels that are flagged in Nigeria, registered in Nigeria and also operated by Nigeria. After increasing the number of inspections we now go on board these vessels to ensure compliance. We have also brought down the number of vessels detained under the flag state control. The other indicator is the number of incidences, safety incidence, accidents and all of that, we have also brought that down significantly, because of our interventions and the fact that we are up and doing to ensure compliance, he”, he concluded.
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