INTERVIEW WITH OMATSEYE 2
NPA Is An Operator Our Boats Are Too Small, We Hear Distress Call, But We Can’t Do Anything…DG NIMASA
When we were packaging this interview page last week, the popular printers devil was at work; not only were some aspects missing, some vital parts were muddled. So, this week (and with full apologise to our numerous readers), we reproduce the interview with Mr Temisan Omatseye, the DG, NIMASA.
Since your appointment as DG, we haven’t heard anything about wrecks removal, why?
It is because in 2009, the budget submitted had provision for wrecks removal and by the time we received the budget there was zero budget allocation, we are facing the same problem again this year, there is no budgetary allocation. I think we are getting it wrong with wrecks removal because it is abandoned vessels that becomes wrecks, if we have a ship recycling facility, we will be able to take the abandoned vessel and convert them into steel before they become wrecks, what is happening is that these vessels sink and become wrecks, whereas we can take these vessels when they are abandoned, strip them and they will be no longer wrecks. So, what we should be focusing on is how to convert these abandoned vessels to recyclable instrument. As I speak to you today, we are in the process of trying to support the ship recycling facility here in Nigeria, as a matter of fact we have somebody in London right now; at a ship recycling conference, the policy on ship recycling is in place, the companies that are going to do it on PPP are ready, its just for us to get the implementation order, it is when we do this that we can now begin to pick out all these abandoned vessels and begin to scrap them and we can now begin to remove the wrecks and also begin to scrap them because it is these vessels that constitute the wrecks. So, why are we looking at the end problem rather than looking at the beginning problem, what has led to all these wrecks coming in? What happens is that foreigners come in, sail their vessels on Nigerian waters, get the clearance, paid their port dues, the crew jump off the vessels and take off so we are like the dumping ground.
So why is the conflict between NPA and NIMASA over removal of wrecks?
We don’t have a conflict; the issue is that any wreck in the channel where the ship comes in is NPA’s responsibility and anything off the channel is NIMASA responsibility, so there is no conflict, we have a committee and we are working together on this. NIMASA is the regulator of the maritime sector, NPA is an operator, we set the standards, once a vessel gets to 200 nautical miles off Nigerian waters, it is ours, the only time NPA takes over is when it crosses the East Moles and enters the harbours, we need to get that very clear. But, what we do in NIMASA is that we have a synergy, for example the Customs works with ASYCUDA, but the information is made available to us live here too, the Navy works with radar and so on but as they receive information at Beecroft, we are also receiving the information live at our Resource Center, the Air Force has got some beautiful aircrafts for maritime security and so on, but do you know that NIMASA staff are at Benin being trained aboard these air craft now , that is the synergy and how government should work together, everybody should put their resources together, focus on their key areas and let us do it. My policy is that if I see a vessel on my screen that is illegal on Nigerian waters, I should be able to pick up my phone and call Chief of Naval Staff and say to him “send your boats” and I should also call the Chief of Air Staff to send an aircraft, I don’t need to buy an airplanes. NIMASA is responsible for search and rescue operations and that is why we bought a helicopter; it is a search and rescue helicopter but we are trying to convert it now when it comes to operation to become a surveillance helicopter, we are going to put some cameras underneath it so that when it flies over, it will be taking pictures and live feeds back to the resource center for our boats to be engaged.
We understand that some of your boats are not so big …..
All our boats are pollution boats and they are for pollution control, but we have in our budget when it is approved (and I am sure you are aware that we don’t have a budget yet) that we are going to have a fast boat. How can we react to situations if you don’t have boats even though we know we are the problem is coming from. The plan is that if we have some boats that can do 55nautical iles…., the boys that operate on the water will cool down. Let us be sincere, we hear when there is call for help, we hear it, but we can not walk on water, even if you can do, the man will still overtake us. It’s a problem that we are facing.
What are the problems of NIMASA?
It is capacity building and training, to get people to know what their job is and what they are expected to do and also for us to track what they are doing to ensure that they are doing what we are paying them to do and that is becoming good now because we now have a new MPR (management performance review); which means that on a monthly basis, the directors stand up and tell us what they have done for last month and then we score them, we try to bring a sort of private sector mentality to them.
What is your assessment of Cabotage implementation so far?
I said it earlier on that the best we can do is to create the environment, but you see what Nigerians want is for us to create the environment and still put the food in their mouth, I can’t put the food and still feed you and that is the problem I am facing with them, local participation is improving, I guess our Cabotage registry when we came in had nine vessels and now we have over 350 vessels on Cabotage registry. But I am not very comfortable with the quality of the vessels that we have, we need to improve on the quality of the vessels. Cabotage has not succeeded the way we would like, I am not very happy with what we are seeing, I believe it has to do with our own problem in- house as well; we don’t have enough surveyors, enforcement officers, we are not doing what really needs to be done and so there need to be a total mind set change. Sincerely speaking, NIMASA should be represented at every single port, terminals and any vessel that berths in Nigeria it should be NIMASA going out there to check the papers, we are an agency that is focused on revenue generation, enforcement and other key functions which can only be carried out at our zonal offices, that is where the money is and not at No. 4 Burma Road, here is just to focus on pure administration and let the work be done outside. That is my personal opinion, but I will get to that stage by the grace of the almighty God.
Talking about training, how many Nigerian cadets do we have out there?
We have 28 in Egypt and 25 in India, they are coming back this year when they are on holidays, they have done quiet well and it is only four of them that could not cope, but there is going to be more cadets to be sponsored by the states, I hear Kaduna state is sending in their money and there is still going to be more.
What are you doing in your own time to ensure that we have more than one maritime academy?
The issue of maritime academy is not my responsibility; there is a Maritime Academy of Nigeria which has its premier campus at Oron, they (naturally) are supposed to have additional campuses because the Academy can sit in council and say okay we want to set up satellite campuses of maritime academies in other locations, it is their responsibility. The problem I am having right now is that Cabotage does not only have to do with vessel acquisition, it has to also do with capacity building, what if we have all the vessels and we don’t have crewing? It means we are back to square one, so what we are doing now is that we have plan for the committee to identify other locations for other maritime academies in Nigeria. Interestingly Yaba College of Technology has started a school to train officers and cadets, we have two of NIMASA personnel on the advisory committee of that institution, slowly we will identify some land but what we are doing is that we are doing the new maritime academy on a purely Public Private Partnership basis, we are already discussing with Greece, Norway and we have about four countries that have expressed interest in doing the PPP maritime academy. Look at what happened in the UK, most of the people are going to train in the UK, if you go to the Philippines most of the shipping lines are the ones that set up the maritime academies in the Philippines to train their staff unto the vessels, so why can’t we? The one we have there Maersk is part of it, so what we are trying to see now is: how do we get the time with these shipping lines to say ‘we should train these people as a feedstock for your vessels’ but you must understand that we are facing so many challenges; maritime security, maritime pollution, beached vessels and so on, but we do know that things are going to happen gradually soon.
You were reported to have spent $1.7million dollars to remove just four of the beached vessels, are we not going to need like $1billion to remove the rest?
I think you need to be mariners and appreciate what a mariner goes through, you need to watch the video of what happened at the site, really what we are doing is not our responsibility, it is the responsibility of a P&I insurance for them to be removed. The squall that happened was an Act of God which is normally covered by insurance policies and they normally pay for the salvage, but guess what, our vessels don’t have insurance and so they got stuck there, the vessels were sitting on the beach, if we had acted immediately, we would have removed most of those vessels within that amount. Don’t look at $1.7 million as the cost, you need to see the break down of the equipment that were used, the vessel sitting on the beach had been so high up into the sand that we had to dredge around it to allow water to come in, then we had to take two tug boats that were chartered from Ivory Coast to tie on each end and pull the vessel while they were digging around it, it was a per day charge and not free, we needed a large tug boat to pull these vessels out, and guess what, the sea has a high tide and low tide, we went in there for 10 days when there was high tide and when the whole tide went we were finished, we could not do anything and the money they approved for us had finished and we have now reapplied. We were very careful and we got Indigenous Shipowners Association of Nigeria to give us an undertaking that they will pay, so they are going to refund us our money, whatever they give us, we will take. The whole situation now is that if we leave these vessels there, they will become a problem to the eco system. People are saying that the money is much, but if I leave these vessels there, which I can easily do and you will them sinking into the beach.
To what extent has NIMASA used CVFF to assist Indigenous ship owners?
CVFF like you said is the fund for the Cabotage vessel financing, I think we are the only administration that has gone further as it relates to CVFF, we came in here with a funny mindset, we came in meeting this issue of ship acquisition fund which became like a national cake, people collected the money and nobody paid back, we are still having challenges trying to get them to pay back and as a matter of fact, it is a major issue. I have always said that the CVFF is not a national cake, but before we came in there where self regulations on how CVFF is to be disbursed, I can tell you right now that we have done most of that in the sense that we have picked the primary lending institutions and we have also agreed on the interest rates, the board of NIMASA has approved the interest rate for CVFF, as I speak to you now, one of the papers which I received today was the list of applicants of each bank for CVFF, but I have not signed it, we have $50million in the bank, but the application can not be less than $1billion. So, how are we going to share the money that Nigerians will not come and say that you have picked your own chosen company for the facility? That is the situation I am facing, it is there on my table and its one of the things I am taking home to go and pour holy water on (laughs) that God should give me the wisdom of how to deal with it, because I have seen all the names there and how can you tell them that they can’t get it? This is the challenge that we are facing right now.
Can’t you just give a few and forget it, since you can not give them all the amount that they are requesting for?
Out of the number that we have, if you give just two people, the rest will shout, so where do we start from. The money is actually a $100million because NIMASA is bringing 50 per cent, the banks are bring 35per cent, the borrower is bring 15per cent, so if we take our $50million and their own contributions, then it actually comes to $100million. Helping to purchase just two vessels does not help me as the DG NIMASA; we need a lot more than that. So what I am trying to do is to see how I can take the banks out of play, how can I make the current efforts to be a private sector driven thing and the only way to do that is to create the businesses. Let us say for instance we have a lot of products coming in, how can I make sure that only Nigerian vessels can do the lighterage because we are facing a problems right now, there is a conspiracy between international importers and the local flagged vessels where they exclude Nigerian flagged vessels from doing business. So what we are trying to say now is why don’t we do it that only Nigerian flagged vessels can do it, with NNPC protection for products we can actually have a cash flow business for Nigerians which banks can now use as a basis for repayment of the loan, we have to change our mindset of thinking and that is what we are trying to do, it is not easy because it is like a one man riot squad.
How far have you gone with your desire to help indigenous ship owners to access offshore funding?
We have accessed $200million and it is available to Nigerian ship owners right now but you know that as an agency we can not go ahead and support this kind of money without the approval of the necessary authourities, so we are in the process of seeking approval. Mark you, the arrangement does not involve any guarantee from NIMASA, the fund is going to be a pool of money which will join the maritime infrastructure fund development money, we are also asking government for some additional money to help us out and we are hoping that when that response is positive, we will come back and tell you. CVFF is a local indigenous capacity building, we have to think international, even with all the seafarers training that we have, if there is no international flag vessel the seafarers can not get their certificate of competency, you can only get it by sailing on international vessels, you can get a local one, but that’s the end of it, now how can we send our seafarers to international vessels, how do we bring back things like the international carrier so that we can take our cadets from the maritime academy and place them on these vessels like what LNG is doing right now and begin to develop them. Look at what Arik Airline and Virgin Nigeria are doing; they brought aircrafts and employed expatriates, but they put Nigerians there to be trained as pilots, which is what we need to do as Nigerians. I believe that some positive changes are going to happen this year. As a matter of fact that is why we have ISAN here today to meet with me, because I need to learn a bit more of what have been the problem, why have we not been able to carry Nigerian crude, what has been the excuses of NNPC, so that it can be my burden and let me take it. Shehu Ladan (former promised us that he is going to support us but now he is no longer there so the game starts all over again and I have not been able to penetrate to the new man, so now I am going to meet directly with the minister and see how we can take it from there.
You have so far done like one year here, how can you rate your performance?
Sincerely speaking we have been receiving commendations, but, the truth of the matter is that I am not happy because I have not achieved what I really thought I will achieve in the space of time. The reason for this is that people from the outside see things from the inside and don’t really know what it is, what we face here is that issues have come up and we just dealt with them and it has not really allowed us to align with our agenda, interestingly many of the things that have crept up are part of our five point agenda and we have dealt with them as they come up. We really need to go back and look at what we have achieved in the last year. Sitting down to assess what I have done so far is not something that I have had the comfort of doing, because on a daily basis we are faced with a lot of issues and we are just dealing with them as they come. I think in our first year anniversary we should be able to come out and say this is what we have done and guess what, this is my first budget and I have not even received it yet, so how can I do anything?.
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