“Nigerian Ports’ Infrastructure And Facilities Are Over-Stretched”

“Policy Failure Causes Stagnation In The Maritime Industry”   …Dr Ade Dosunmu (Ex DG, NIMASA)

Dr Ade Dosunmu’s tenure as the DG, NIMASA was quite impactful; he made in-roads into so many areas. Sadly however, he could not see his plans through; owing to his unexpected removal.  His experience as a former management staff of NPA was brought to bear in his assignment as the CEO of the apex maritime industry regulatory agency. He has remained in touch with the Nigerian maritime industry since he was removed from office about two years ago. An expert in public policy, Dosunmu, in this interview, says that the problem with Nigerian maritime industry lies in the lack of proper policy conceptualization and formulation, causing implementation failure on the long run.

Would you say that Nigeria’s maritime sector is in a position to contribute to the economic development of this nation?
Thank you very much. I have had the privileged to go through the sector. I worked with the Nigeria Port Authority and the Nigeria Maritime and Administration and Safety Agency, which regulate the industry.
And I believe that the Nigerian maritime sector has not been doing too badly.     Over the years, there have been some improvements in terms of human capacity building, in terms of port operations, in terms of regulatory activities by the apex maritime regulatory body. But, that is not the best we can get from the sector.
I have a personal opinion, which I will like to express, and that is the fact that, the sector has a lot of potentials that have not been fully tapped.
As we speak, I can tell you that we have not tapped up to 50 per cent of the potentials of the Nigerian maritime industry. In terms of human capacity, I believe that Nigeria has the potential to supply more than 30 to 40 per cent of the world’s requirement for seafarers.
Philippines with the population of 60 million people, contributes 30 per cent of the world’s Seafarers, and if you compare that with Nigeria, a country with the population of 150 million people, and we are not able to supply up to five per cent. We have not even been able to supply the requirement of local demand talk less of meeting global requirement. So I believe that a lot needs to be done in that area, and in the area of port development, because if you look at our ports, they are over-stretched. And I have said this over and over again that as a matter of urgency, government needs to address the issue of port development. It is not something that we can leave to the private sector; government must be at the forefront of it.
Recently, I was interviewed and I said this, and I am still saying that when the nation’s nine ports were created, they had an installed capacity of 24-25 million metric tonnes of cargoes. That is the cargo throughput. But today, the same ports are handling over 60 million metric tonnes of cargoes. So you can see the difference, over 35 million metric tonnes. That means the ports infrastructure and facilities are over-stretched. And what that tells us is that there is need for new ports development. There is need for new green fields port development. And if government is waiting for the private sector to do all these things, it will take time. And I believe government should be at the forefront of it. Government should commission a study. I mean set up a team to carry out a comprehensive study of the Nigerian Coastlines and look at the areas that are very viable for deep Seaport. And then government should move in and take the initiative of identifying those areas and take up some expenses like provision of some maritime infrastructure that may be too expensive for this private sector to operate, like break waters. An average businessman thinks about how he is going to recover his investment as quickly as possible. Like that type of cost, government can take it up.

In what way do you think Nigeria can come out of inadequate maritime manpower?
Well, there are several ways I would like to talk about my experience when I was the director-general of NIMASA. What I did first may be because of my own background (the research background) was to carry out a survey of manpower requirement in the maritime industry. I realised that more than 70 per cent of the seafarers operating on our water were foreigners. And it is not because those shipping companies or those vessel owners did not want to engage us, but we didn’t even have qualified seafarers. We saw that as a very critical problem, and we needed to come out with intervention strategy, and that was what led to the introduction of the Nigerian Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP). It was aimed at serving as a quick intervention programme to shore up our stocks of qualified manpower in the next five years. It was meant to train 25 cadets per state for the 36 states of the federation on the counter part-funding basis.
Under the programme, NIMASA is to take 40 per cent of the training responsibility, while states 60 per cent, because we knew that it was very expensive and costly to train a seafarer. You have to send them out on a five years programme after their basic qualifications.
They also have to go for the Certificate of Competency, which also take sometime. So, all these put into considerations, government needs to play a role to be able to encourage people to go to sea and take up seafaring as a profession. It was after our own initiative that the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) started. We launched our initiative (NSDP) in 2008 and by early 2009; IMO came up with a global policy of trying to encourage people to take to seafaring as a professional course. We believe that, that would help in the next five years.
The other angle to it, which is still not yet attended to, is the development or creation of more Local Maritime Training Institutions. Why do you think that we opted for overseas training institutions? We do that because we don’t have local training institutions. It would be difficult for anybody to make any attempt now to train lawyers abroad. We have enough universities offering law as a course and we also have three or for law schools in Nigeria.
But in the case of the maritime training, you have only one Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron. That institution was set up in the 70s and up till today, that is still the only one we have. And I keep wondering what are we doing. Can that institution admit everybody who desires to have specialised maritime training programme in Nigeria? So for that reason, we proposed, through the Ministry of Transport that they should decentralise maritime training opportunities. Create more maritime institutions in Nigeria. The one in Oron is okay. Create another one in Badagry, create another one in Lokoja and create the third one in Oji, so that people from the Southwest, who want to go for maritime training courses can attend that of Badagry. People from the North could go to the one in Lokoja. People from the East can attend the Oji River. And then the Oron would continue to take care of the interest of the people in the Southsouth. I believe that if you do that, it would also assist in creating awareness and opportunity for a lot of people desirous of having a specialised maritime training as a career. So that is one angle that is still left unattended to. I believe that until we do that, we will not be able to meet up with our domestic requirement for seafarers.
Experience so far in maritime industry is that when you send people out of the country for training, they don’t come back. So the aims of sending them abroad for studies are always defeated.

Are you sure that we are not going to have the same situation in this NSDP programme?
Well, I don’t believe so. And even if it happens, it is not a disadvantage as such. You remembered that I said that Philippine supplied 30 per cent of the world’s seafarers. And if Nigerians train abroad, that is, the Nigerians, we sent out for training get all their necessary qualifications and mandatory and become qualified seafarers and decide to start working wherever they are, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with that.
Because it is still better for them to be engage outside there than to be unemployed at home.
Secondly, there is a policy in Philippines, there is a legislation that makes it mandatory for every Philippines working outside their country to remits certain per cent of their income back. It is compulsory by way of legislation. As at 2008, Philippines realised over $5 billion as remittance from seafarers working outside the country.
So, there is nothing stopping Nigeria from also exporting our professionals if we feel that we have more than enough manpower for local requirements.    
The surplus can work outside the country and then remits whatever they get. And these are what constitute Diaspora remittance. And this Diaspora remittance constitutes a major input for some of these free funds for investments. So, I don’t see anything wrong in it. If you look at the population of Nigeria, we must begin to address the issue of unemployment. We must begin to address how we can fully utilise the potentials of our teeming youths rather than people going into the universities studying courses that would not have relevance in the industry. As at the time I left the office, the maritime industry had capacity to engage more than 10, 000 professionals, both seafarers and other shore professionals. I give you an instance, the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) is now on train 5 or Train 6. This has its implication for human resource requirement. Apart from that, there are two or three NLNGs that are likely to come up. One: Olokola, (2) Brass and (3) Lekki sea deep port. All these are projects that are envisaged to come up between now and 2015. Where are we going to get the manpower requirement to service these operations? That means we are still to be relying on foreign seafarers, because, NLNG moves their product with vessels. You can imagine the level of shipping activities that will be going on at the ports.  The last trip I made to IMO council meeting, I was just chatting with a Singaporean, she said that their fleet needed over 2,000 qualified seafarers. That they have shortage of over 2,000 seafarers to man their national fleets and that by the time vessels that were in the shipyard were out of the shipyard, the requirement might be doubled.

In what way do you think the government or policy makers can assist to develop the industry?
Well, you see, one thing people take for granted and that is the bane of our development. Maritime sector development is the role of policy. You see, policy drives direction. In a situation where people just sit down and operate without working within any policy framework, is not helping. It is not possible for the regulator and the operator to have monopoly of all the knowledge that is required to drive the Nigerian maritime industry. If you are in Nigerian port, you can only be very vast in port operations. You may not be as vast or versatile in maritime regulation. But I believe that, if government want to get the required tonnage and to achieve what we need to prepare our industry to the level its supposed to be, government must find a way to bring policy experts together to sit down, discuss and brainstorm and come out with ideas or suggestions that can serve as inputs into the policy process. For instance, when I was in the office, I proposed to the Minister of Transport, the setting up of maritime’s policy and advisory group. The minister approved it. The former minister approved it, and I think he gave me the suggestion that who and who should be invited. And our ideal then was that as director general of NIMASA, it would be funny that I will have all ideas and experience, all the exposure that is required to drive that industry. As a bureaucrat, you may not understand, because you have never been an operator. But what I felt we should do was to bring the operators to let them be part of that council. Bring the maritime arbitrators, bring the maritime lawyers, bring the academicians, let them be part of the council, and bring those that have also contributed to the development of the sector in one way or the other. Bring them in. and then let them, may be quarterly or monthly, brainstorm on the maritime environment generally. They will thereafter advise the government on what is needed to be done besides, making contribution to the Ministry of Transport. And their contribution would always serve as a reference point or an input into government’s policy process. I believe we still need to address those issues, because they have it all over the world. They have it in Canada; they have it in Australia. In Australia, they called it ‘Ocean Advisory Council, in Canada- they called it- Canada Maritime Policy Advisory Council. In United Kingdom, they have it. Because after oil and gas in Nigeria, the next sector that happens to have huge potentials and that looks so promising is the maritime sector. So we need to take it very seriously and get an institutional framework in place that will address the issue of policy. In the last lecture, I delivered at the 2010 industry leadership lecture of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, I made it clear to them there that the problem of the sector was that of policy failure. And what is responsible for policy failure? It is nothing but poor policy conception. Who are the people thinking and coming out with this policy. What are their backgrounds? What are their levels?  What have they done before in their lives? Somebody will just sit down and write a paper. Policy has to go through scrutiny. Policy process from formulation stage, you have to subject it to a lot of critical analyses, because a policy is meant to address a problem, and if that policy fails from inception or if that policy is not well conceived, how is it going to address that problem. And may be, because it is my own area of specialisation. And I always tell people that once you get your policy right, the next stage is implementation. You know that there is a process in policy management, policy formulation, implementation and evaluation, so policy formulation is a problem in Nigeria, because we don’t usually subject them to enough critical analysis and input of a wider consideration. At the point of the implementation, we can still manage it. Evaluation is also another problem, because after policy formulation, after implementation, there is usually no feedback mechanism to even sit down and look at how have these policies fared. Have these policies achieved the desired objectives? These are issues that needed to be addressed. And unless you address it by bringing experts from the industry, the problem will remain unsolved. Let me tell you, in the whole of Nigeria, I don’t think that we are up to 10 or 20, who are experts in public policy. I can tell you, if not for my new engagement, I got an invitation from a South African University, to be a visiting scholar in the area of comparative public policy, because they are trying to look at South Africa and Nigeria. The study was to commence early this year, but I couldn’t because it would have required me to stay in South Africa for about four or five months. Their own expert too would have to come here for about four or five months, because it is a comparative thing. That is to tell you of a country that takes the issue of policy very seriously, despite the fact that they are known to be ahead of us, they are still interested in finding out how things operate in our own policy system.
If you look at the sector generally, there has been instability of leadership, especially in the regulatory aspect of it.

Don’t you think that may affect the growth of the industry?
Yes, I believe so, because it is very unfortunate. I think government is to be blame for that. People should be allowed to run their tenure, except something very serious is found against them and that must be substantiated, I don’t see a reason why government will appoint somebody for tenure of four years and cut him down midway without any tangible reason for doing that. It’s very sad when you even know that that appointment is a statutory appointment back up by law. And then government keeps saying that we have respect for rule of law. The government should endeavour to find out certain things before accepting memo from a minister. What has that person done? Has he in anyway contravened the provisions of that Act? Has he been subjected to investigation? What is the outcome of the investigation? Has he been found wanting. I mean we don’t do that here! When we go to IMO meetings, there are some faces that we have for the past 10 years representing their countries, because they have what we called stability.
But in Nigeria, when you go, you see this face this years as the director general another face next year and then it’s takes time for you to understand this sector. It takes time for you to really understand the sector. By the time you understand and you are given effective representation to the country you are removed. A new person is brought in and that one starts learning again, and who is losing? It’s the country that is losing. So, I don’t believe in the way and manner that public officers’ tenures are being tempered with. More especially when those appointments are tenured. I believe that they should be allowed to run out their tenure except there is a contravention.

In what way can we attract direct foreign investors into the maritime industry?
There are a lot of ways by which we can do that, but we must look at the issues of incentives by way of tax. And also by making our fleet very attractive. Our waters must be perceived to be very safe. And also, our government must be seen to be serious and stable. And we must also have policies that would encourage the inflow of foreign investors into the maritime sector. One thing that people don’t understand is that it is not every time you look at your gains from the angle of Naira and Kobo. Sometimes, the gains come by way of social contract. If an investor comes into Nigeria now and establishes a shipping company, and employs 1,000 seafarers, even if that person is not contributing anything directly by way of Naira and Kobo, but the employment he has provided means that those people will pay tax and they will be able to reduce social tension, because they will be able to also take care of their families.

*Called from The Guardian