Dr. Okwuashi Alex (Registrar CIS)
To address the issue of fake and uncertificated seafarers, some of the following steps must be taken: first NIMASA needs to carry out training institutions audit to confirm the legality, mandate, content of programme and accreditation status with either NBTE, federal ministry of education or the National Assembly and even NIMASA in case of STCW 95. Secondly, it should be mandatory for all vessels trading in Nigeria to be surveyed, declared sea worthy and registered by NIMASA. Thirdly, manning agents and ship owners often take the risk of engaging the services of quacks and uncertificated seafarers in order to safe operational cost, hence forth NIMASA should warn, sanction and publish their names.
Also the Nigerian Navy in collaboration with NIMASA should arrest and prosecute any fake seafarer involved. However persons interested in seafaring as a profession should follow due process which is to pass their WAEC or NECO and seek admission into an approved college or academy to study basic nautical or related seamanship programmes. These are necessary in order to gain sea experience and certify other IMO STCW 95 requirements. However, refreshers should be organized for these categories of quacks by NIMASA or shipowners.
John Ahleakhwe Okpono (Merchant Navy)
The number one factor responsible for this issue of fake seafarers is the high poverty rate in this country, so many seafarer families live in perpetual poverty because of the fact that they are not getting jobs, some of them are cadets that have finished from the Maritime Academy in Oron and School of Oceanography but at the end of the day their certificate is not being recognized unlike the ones obtained in Ghana. You see a lot of them roaming the streets and driving Okada, this is why you see a lot of our young men trooping to Ghana for training and the ones that cannot afford to go but still want to work will have no choice but to result to forgery.
One of the steps in ensuring that our seafarers are brought up to date is this step taken by NIMASA through the introduction of the seafarers identification document (SID), now if you claim that you are a seafarer you must have this document for you to be able to operate even across borders, I think this will go a long way in solving the problem.
Hugh Friday Nwaneri (Elkins marine training int’l ltd)
The scourge of fake certification by seafarers in this country is mainly caused by laziness, majority of our cadets are not ready to sit and write the required exams instead they see forgery as the best way out, it is traceable to students not being able to meet the international requirement, you don’t just get up and say you want to get a seafarer certificate, you have to get the required sea time, you must posses a secondary school certificate among other things, but you will find out that in MAN Oron and Oceanography today, some cadets swill not meet the requirements by the international body to begin their carrier and what they do is to find a shot cut to go and get it.
What government needs to do is to focus on the areas that are key and discourage those that are aiding in issuing the fake certificates, if they don’t issue it the boys will not want to opt for it, there should also be punishments for those who are caught to have forged certificates to work aboard vessels. But the other problem is that some of the indigenous ship owners prefer cheap labour and so they will rather entrust their vessel in the hands of an unqualified seafarer because they will cheaper, this has encouraged the bad eggs to keep growing.
Dr. Stephen Afolabi. (Lecturer)
One thing that is peculiar with us in Nigeria is identifying problems, another thing is to solve these problems, but even when we try to solve it, the implementation becomes another major problem. Everybody knows about the issue of fake manning agents, NIMASA labour department knows about it too, there is no way a fake certificate can beat the security at NIMASA unless an insider or group of insiders are colluding with the syndicate outside. The worst victims of certificate racketeering in the maritime industry are the trained and certificate- carrying seafarers, many of whom are stagnated at the level of either third class in the old order or officer of the watch keeping under the new dispensation of certificate upgrading and verification as directed by the IMO. I think government should try and first of all bring our maritime academies up to date by equipping them, secondly the solution also lies in the hands of the indigenous ship owners to give our cadets sea time, I believe with the availability of the ship acquisition fund which is now available to them they will be able to buy standard ships that will afford our seafarers sea time. After these efforts are put in place, any other groups suspected to be carrying fake certificates should be blacklisted by NIMASA and ISAN members.
Otunba Kunle Folarin (Chairman, National Seafarers’ Welfare Board)
First, we have a lot of unaccredited maritime schools in Nigeria today and this has constituted to the emergence of fake seafarers, majority of them do not get the best training required and so when they come out they can not cope with what it takes to be in the profession. And because they went to a school that is not certified, they cannot continue from there, but they want to acquire the certificates to push themselves into the system and since they cannot get in, what do they do?, they go to the fakes in order to get jobs, at the end of the day it all tells on our maritime system. We need to first of all identify these schools and make sure that they are no longer in existence and if they want to be in existence, we should encourage them to meet the standard internationally so that the more schools we have the better for the sector and the nation.
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