Professor G.G Darah was a former Chairman of the Board of the Guardian Newspaper; he is a Professor of Literature in English at Delta State University, and Chief Executive Officer of GP Treasure Lake, a consultancy firm. He is the academic consultant to the Nigerian Maritime University, Okerenkoko, in Warri Delta State. The school is a project of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), the ground-breaking ceremony was recently carried out by President Goodluck Jonathan. Shipping Position Daily correspondent, Dapo Olawuni who covered the event, caught up with Professor Darah on the sidelines and he spoke about the NIMASA university project.
How were you appointed as academic consultant to the maritime university?
NIMASA put up an advertisement asking for consultants to apply in order to design an academic curriculum, the National University Commission has a standard that must be complied with and the consulting firm which I am chairman of; GP Treasure Lake also applied and I put forward a team of 18 people and nine professors, three among them were former Vice Chancellors. NIMASA thereafter gave the job to us to handle, we have been on it, we have designed all the courses and we also found out that this is an important and significant project of President Jonathan’s administration, he is the only President in Africa who approved 12 universities in one year, one in Ekiti, one in Otuoke in Beyelsa State, and 10 in the northern Nigeria in order to calm down the Boko Haram insurgents that doesn’t want people to go to school. This one in Okerenkoko is called; Nigerian Maritime University and it is the first of its kind in Nigeria.
Do you think this maritime university can bridge the gap in maritime capacity?
The waterways in Nigeria are 3,000 kilometers long, we have a vast terrain and vast resources, but who are the people that follow the ships to Nigeria? They are from Philippines, Malaysia. Nigerians are not just there, we don’t have mariners, yet we are water side people. This was what President Jonathan saw and said he must break the yoke by saying we should have this university. The significance of the school is that it is located inside the heart of the mangrove forest and it suited my own attitude, because for 10 years that I worked with government of Delta state, I insisted government must put a higher institution inside the mangrove, from Ilaje to Okpobo is 600 kilometres long and yet there is no university in it, and because they neglected it, it later became a hide out for militants, this university project is one way to demilitarize the place and turn it into a centre of international traffic of knowledge. We searched the world and found out that the Philippines lead the world in the maritime studies, they have 44 maritime universities in the Philippines, half of the people who follow ships around the world are from Philippines, one quarter of the budget of the Philippines is money that the workers in the ship repatriate back home, so the country lives on maritime and Filipinos do not have more rivers than Nigeria. NIMASA’s records shows that Nigeria needs 150 mariners just to man the ships that come and go, we have not built our own ship yet and we have less than 1,000, there is a gap of 140, 000 trained staff, we are not talking about those building the boat, we are talking of Captains and Engineers who can take a ship from Warri and round the world and come back to Warri Port through electronic communication. In January, we went to Liverpool at John Moore University in the United Kingdom, we have already entered agreement with them for lecturers because they are experienced, there are 50 Nigerians training there now, we are going to Singapore next month to Nayang University, they have specialization in maritime studies, so we have designed the courses and they are normal maritime courses, there is maritime transportation which is a degree course, there is maritime engineering, both electrical and nautical engineering, those who will construct ships and these ships will be built in Okerenkoko and this is the essence of the dockyard, but the intellectuals inside Okerenkoko university would have used computer to build the ship which is going to be specified in size, then the builder will build it in the dockyard. Both industries and academy are going to be united inside the university and it is going to be a beehive for the entire West African coast, from Mauritania and Morocco down to Nigeria and from Angola to South Africa, Okerekoko will be the center of intellectual training. Only Egypt has a university of that comparative size called Arab Maritime Academy of maritime studies which is based in Cairo with a campus in Alexandra, one campus in Syria, and the fourth campus in Yemen, this is the most developed in the continent, Ghana has one but cannot be compared, and we have Maritime Academy of Nigeria, in Oron which is for diploma and other programmes.
How will the university affect the environment it is cited in?
Now, we have designed the take-off for degree programmes which is shipping transportation and electronic engineering, maritime technology and maritime environment management to handle this Mangrove forest which is the largest on the continent, it is about 9000 square kilometers, each of the mangrove wood can produce 70 industrial products, the most important product of the Mangrove wood that is covering the body can be used to produce foot wears, it can also make 20 million shoes for primary and secondary school children in Nigeria, we do not have to buy it from anywhere, there are so many opportunities that we have never opened, but this university will open it, it is not just academic alone, industry is attached to it. The third programme we talked about, which is environment management, pollution, cleansing of water, in the whole of Ijaw and Ishekiri land nobody has clean water; it is polluted water that they drink. This university has courses that will create water even from the air and they will be exporting to South Africa because the population is there and there is money, this is what the president has brought into being. Like I said, the intellectual aspect is very important because for hundreds of years people have being sailing these rivers, we have been navigating them, but we have not subjected them to academic investigation in terms of depth, what is the depth of the river, how many shrimps are in the bottom, what of periwinkles? These are maritime resources that will now be harnessed. There is a fourth area that our consultancy has identified and they are called Research Institutes, they are not for degrees but for research; they will focus on finding out how many bacterial that are swimming in the water of Okerenkoko, how many mosquitoes can they yield in one year and how do you eliminate them or how many fishes or fish species are logged in the coast. My own studies shows that all the fishes in West Africa come to Niger Delta to ash their eggs and breed their children, so Niger Delta is like a breeding center or maternity ward to them, and when the fishes have grown and they can swim on their own, they return to their home. 75 percent of the world’s wealth is in the oceans, only one quarter of the wealth is on land, we must create knowledge that will open up the ocean for us, and Nigeria has an ocean corridor that is more than 50 kilometres, there are some countries in the world that will buy that from you, if you give it to Germany or Russia, they will pay trillions of Naira just to have an access to our Atlantic Ocean, I call it ‘The Ocean of Prosperity’ because the richest countries in world are facing the Atlantic, apart from Japan, all the other ones like Brazil, Canada, England, France and South Africa, how can Nigeria now remain poor and we are close to the Atlantic, the Nigerian Maritime University will break that trend.
But you know that to operate the Dockyard, there is need for steel and we don’t have it
The biggest shipyard in the world is at Okpo, in South Korea; I have been there, every two ships you see in the world, one is built in Okpo, they don’t build small ones, they build the ones that you can play football in it, these are called ocean liners, Korea doesn’t not have charcoal, there is no single resource in Korea, yet they build the biggest ships in the world, the underwater engineering and steels are also built by Koreans, yet they do not have an ounce of iron, so don’t worry about the steel. The steel is available.
Speaking of the university, our own fear is about certification of the courses
Certification is a simple matter, the reason why NIMASA appointed us as academic consultants, there are other consultants like those who are building the houses, those who are sand filling, those who are bringing furniture and so on. When the students resume we are going to provide permanent transport, so that if you are going for shopping in Warri somebody must ferry them here, there are other dimensions like catering, the university is a permanent community, and it doesn’t fall. The academic credibility of the courses is already established with the National University Commission, we work with them as consultants and they tell us the standard for each course, if you are doing engineering which is five years, you must finish it there without rushing. Our first college in this university is the college of basic sciences, this is where they will do the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, and if you do not qualify they will turn you away. I have a mariner inside my consultancy team, I have a mariner trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United State of America, they admitted 200 students, but only 25 students graduated, to show you standard, and the standard will be international, in maritime, the ships are international commodities, it must conform with international standards, when you leave the Nigerian port into the next port, it is international, and your water, the cleanness of your ship and the hygiene, the number of doctors, nurses and the entire paraphernalia of government are in a ship. If you are going for three months inside the ship, the food you will eat inside the ship must be certified inside the ship and tested by medical experts before it gets into the ocean, because if the food gets rotten inside the ship, how are you going to save it? You cannot run into the next cafeteria to change it. So, your ship must be self sufficient and that’s why I said it is a government of its own and with the communication and satellite, you are talking to ports in Japan and so on.
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