For the third time in a row the, Senate committee on marine transport last week rejected the 2009 budget of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), even as it asked the agency to shed more light on some grey areas in the proposal.
The NIMASA team which was led the minister of transport, Alhaji Isa Bio also had in attendance the director general of the agency, Dr Ade Dosunmu who had a difficult time convincing the Senators about its proposed accruable revenue and expenditure for 2009.
Specifically, the committee questioned audacity of NIMASA to spend unbudgeted, even as its chairman, Senator Gbemi Saraki complained about what she referred to as the agency’s antecedences of late submission of budget proposal.
“In 2008, we were presented with three different budgets at three different times by the same NIMASA all with differing figures for revenue and expenditure. The first one was on the 4th of December, 2007, the second on the 1st of February, 2008; and the last one was so bad that we had to request the Auditor-General of Federation to please assist the committee in determining the authentic revenue accruals to the agency.”
The Committee equally descended on the NIMASA team over the implementation of the Cabotage Act for what it called shoddy implementation of the five year old law.
At the budget defence, Senator Saraki expressed worries that despite being the implementation agency for Cabotage, the NIMASA management has not been able to improve the lot of indigenous shipowners.
“What specifically has NIMASA done in the two and half to three years to assist the Nigerian shipowners to acquire new vessels? Put in another way, how many ships have been added to the indigenous capacity either for international shipping or for coastal shipping for that matter? It is not enough to lay claims to over a million tonnages in terms of ship registration, a figure which is hard to verify or justify.”
And in apparent deference to the committee, the minister assured that he would be more involved in NIMASA’S execution of its mandate henceforth adding that “the Chairperson has taken us through the other operations of NIMASA and has given marks to NIMASA’s activities in the area of implementation of the management and the acquisition of security and the area of Cabotage operations and implementation, the human development or capacity development which is one of the fundamentals function of NIMASA and others”.
“But if I have to go through the 2008 summary and compare it with the 2009 budget, there are so clear areas that we need to explain actually to justify some of these allocation”, he admitted, even as he assured that the ministry would henceforth be involved in the preparations.
He however assured that the agency’s penchant for delay in the submission of its budget would be a thing of the past. “Delay presentation of budget as you have clearly identified has been the ritual practice of NIMASA. I what to assure you that from 2009 budget preparation for 2010, there would be clear deviations from this ritual of late budget submission to the National Assembly.”
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