“With NIMAREX, What We Saw From The Outing Was The Hunger And Thirst In Nigerians To See Such A Thing Happen In Their Own Ground”…Engr Greg Ogbeifun
Engr, Greg Ogbeifun belongs to the respected group of first generation seafarers. He is a quiet person, no doubt, but the recent maritime industry exhibition called ‘NIMAREX 2011’ brought him and his acumen into limelight as the expo; apart from being a one-of-its-kind experience in Nigeria also recorded huge successes. He has not spoken to any media man or outfit since the world class exhibition held, but our editor, got an appointment to have a chat with him at his cozy home on Victoria Island, Lagos recently. It turned out be as revealing and fulfilling as expected. This is the first part of the interview. Enjoy it.
Congratulations on the success of the NIMAREX 2011 and the one year anniversary of MV Osayame, how do you feel?
I am very elated and grateful to God, I am very happy that the efforts that were put into organizing NIMAREX 2011 turned out well, and of course for the MV Osayame, I am also grateful for the positive stories.
NIMAREX was a very big event, what informed the idea of organizing that kind of event for the maritime industry?
I will say that NIMAREX was a brain child of ISAN because they initiated the idea and brought me to chair the committee that planned the event, so I will say that is where it all started from. We had to open- up the idea of NIMAREX to go beyond any particular sector, this is why we brought- in people from the private sector and also people from the public sector to constitute the organizing committee; so we had a very strong government support and participation as well as that of the private sector in the planning, so you find out that the constitution of the planning committee spread out across the industry and today I think NIMAREX is a national issue.
But what were the objectives you had in mind when it was being conceived?
It is very simple, like you know that every year Nigerians troop out to attend exhibitions and conferences in different parts of the world: Singapore, Malaysia, USA and other places where people travel out to attend maritime expo. In the last 50 years, this country’s maritime sector have come of age, we felt that it was time that we showcased our own accomplishments in the maritime industry which is quiet successful and that is why the idea of having the expo in order to bring out the indigenous achievements; both individually and corporately. The government itself has achieved quite a lot during this period by establishing appropriate Acts and laws to encourage indigenous maritime activity group, and we felt that it was time that this thing was showcased, also the world is beginning to look at Nigeria as a destination for maritime events and developments, and this is justified by the presence and active participation of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) representative; the secretary general himself was supposed to be here, but he had a previous engagement and he sent a top executive of IMO to represent him and that is an endorsement of what we are doing here and I think it should be encouraged, the objective in summary is to bring out where we were as a maritime nation, where we are and where we possibly can go, there is still a lot of work to do though.
Why I asked the question is because some people have argued that Nigeria does not pass for a maritime nation as we do not have a niche to sell, do you also agree?
I do not agree at all, Nigeria has a lot of niches to sell to the world, Nigeria’s economy is predicated on oil, and a large percentage of the oil is located offshore, and there is no single activity relating to the oil exploitation, exploration and development that does not factor on a high level of maritime activity, starting from the rigs to the support vessels, to the export tankers, to the storage and processing units like the LPSO and the FSO; these are all maritime related, so from that contention, Nigeria is first of all a great maritime nation. Now, the question is who are the active participants in the maritime industry in Nigeria, up till now it has been predominantly foreign players and that is why the government; through lofty ideas like the Cabotage Act, (and now the Nigerian content issue) is trying to encourage indigenous participation to break the hold by the foreign players, so whilst that is going on, the little achievements must be appreciated. Only recently Nigerdock carried out a comprehensive servicing and maintenance of one of the largest oil rigs in the west African sub region, this happened in this country and it is a major maritime achievement, if you look at the likes of the Indigenous Ship-owners Association which has been trying to bring an awareness of indigenous ship ownership and operation in this country, they have achieved quite a bit, they are advocating continuously for Nigerian participation in crude lifting and establishing indigenous shipping lines and so on. It never used to be there, so there is a growth, if you look at ISAN specifically and the members of that body, you will see that there is a large number of Nigerians who are beginning to get aware and get involved in this business, they may not actually be getting it right now, but they are starting to be appreciated, and that is why we encourage the likes of the members of ISAN to come and showcase themselves; let the world know that you can own ships, they may be old ships but at least you start with something, you can only graduate from there to bigger ones; these are for the downstream. For the upstream, they have the likes of my humble self; Starz Investment that is now actively participating in the deep offshore which was an environment that was exclusively preserved for the foreign players before now, we also have the likes of C&I Leasing who are now venturing into marine and they are doing well, I am talking about real indigenous companies and not those who are fronting to be Nigerian indigenous company, but who in actual fact are foreign. So with all these that I have mentioned, we felt that it was time we began to showcase our capabilities. Now, most of the people outside the country are venturing into the country through the back door, through an outing like NIMAREX they could come out and make business connections and affiliations that they can use to grow their business here without doing it the wrong way. Coming to the aspect of maritime infrastructure which is also related to ship ownership and operation, you will be amazed with how many Nigerian companies are building such small things like badges, small tugs, they are maintaining small crafts, but that is the foundation being laid for the future of shipbuilding and proper ship repair in this country. If we do not encourage them at the level that they are, to come forward and show the world what they are doing at their level, then we would kill then prematurely, so if you noticed that during the NIMAREX expo there are one or two indigenous companies that are called equipment manufacturers, if you see what these guys do in Port Harcourt, you will be amazed, they are building tugs, they are building badges and these needed to be exposed. At this first outing of NIMAREX, a lot of people were registered but did not turn up, you wait and see what happens next year, people are going to come out in full force to showcase what they have and I think it should be encouraged and we are very conscious of the fact that the international community is also taking it seriously, you saw the number of participants either as exhibitors or delegates, in some of the seminars they were discussants and they were moderators. We needed to do this, let it be that it is not everything bad that comes out of Nigeria, something good can also come out, the maritime sector has been very quiet for a long time and it is time for us to begin to show the world that we are coming of age, we must be taken seriously and we are going somewhere.
Without crude oil, can Nigeria not be a maritime nation; with the population that we have, the land mass and other aquatic endowments?
Without oil Nigeria will always be a very important maritime nation if we get a few things right. Maritime nation is basically about importation and exportation by sea, right now you know there are still some challenges with our ports that the government is working very hard to put right, to encourage sea trade to the Nigerian ports as against people going into neighbouring countries to bring in their goods. The aspect of maritime activity in this country that is still grossly untapped is the maritime infrastructure; this country has close to 500 vessels, floating units and rigs operating in our waters every day, a large percentage of them is foreign, but what I am saying is that we are all operating in this country and today 85% to 90% of them are going outside this country to look for maintenance facility, this is a huge capital flight and a huge denial of job creation opportunities, so the government and the private sector need to think seriously about encouraging the establishment of maintenance facilities, ship repair yard and floating repair facilities that will keep these operating units here, besides that, it has the potential also of attracting foreign patronage of these facilities, just like people take their ships from Nigeria to Tema; to Ivory coast; to Cameroun, people will also bring their ship from the eastern and western parts of Africa sub region if these facilities are there. So without oil this is a huge and a major source of revenue, the employment opportunities in the seaborne trade in this country is huge and colossal, and that is what grieves some of us. In the mid 1990’s, I conceptualized the idea of having a ship repair yard in Nigeria and it took me six years from the concept to the actualization stage because nobody wanted to put money into it, so there was a challenge, but eventually with the support of some technocrats who put money into it, we had it in the year 2000, between year 2000 and now we have carried out nearly 500 works on our little floating duck, we are currently in the process of developing the ship yard to a 7000ton capacity, the point I am trying to make is that in 11 years of operating a ship yard in Nigeria, a country that we all know is a copy -cat nation, there has been no other indigenous ship yards that have emerged and that is very sorry. In the period under question, we have two foreign ship yards that have emerged in Port Harcourt, Nigerdock which was the pride of Africa has been sold to a foreign concern, Continental Shipyard which is also Nigerian even though in partnership with an Israeli is no longer functioning. A whole floating dock that is supposed to be a dock sank, it is only in Nigeria that elephants fly, it is only in Nigeria that a floating dock will sink, I have never heard it before, in fact my friends called me from Europe and said Greg what happened? It is embarrassing and disgraceful, so we need to begin to look at these things and begin to pay a bit of attention to them to grow that sector of the maritime industry, it has rich potentials for revenue, job creation, and I don’t know why government at the moment is not doing anything serious about it.
NIMAREX has come and gone, what are you doing to make sure that the envisaged benefits don’t just slip away?
NIMAREX has not come and gone, the Nigerian Maritime Expo 2011 has come and gone, NIMAREX had to be divorced from the idea of the expo, there needed to be a legal entity to make NIMAREX authentic, we have incorporated a NIMAREX limited by guarantee which is now the managing legal body for such things like the maritime expo and other things that we intend that NIMAREX should be doing. The expo which you were asking about was the first one, and naturally there were a lot of lessons to be learnt from the first outing, everybody proclaimed that the outing was a success, but what we saw from the outing was the hunger and thirst in Nigerians to see such a thing happen in their own ground, the attendance was quite outstanding, the level of participation exceeded what we hoped for, but more importantly the level of interest by foreign participants was even more surprising , we had exhibitors from Europe, the Middle East and so on come here, it shows that there is something here that the people are either looking for or they want us to see and we will like to tap into that. One of the things that we will like to see NIMAREX do is to encourage the West African countries and our immediate neighbours, as this is the first in Africa we will want to reach out to them, so that as they have all heard and seen the success of this first outing, they will be part of it, so that collectively we can put our resources together and showcase it to the rest of the world. Secondly NIMAREX must remain a national issue and not a sectional issue, by this it must not be owned by anybody, it must stand alone comprising of private and public sector interest so that they can enjoy overall support, NIMAREX must not be seen as an agitating body, it would not be asking for anything, it will be looking for how to help government’s initiatives succeed. For example, one of the challenges in the industry right now is the dearth of skilled and professionally qualified mariners, we have heard it from the maritime institutions that we don’t have enough skilled lecturers, ship owners are complaining that they don’t have appropriate mariners to guide their ships, maintenance yards are complaining that they don’t have people to work in the yards, so there is a challenge that spreads across the whole industry, the base for producing these people remains a ship, the demise of the Nigerian National shipping Line has led to the situation we are in because national shipping line was a training ground that produced most of the mariners we have, people like me went through the Shell system, but majority of the people we have went through the national shipping line. In the absence of that there has been no articulated approach towards producing Nigerian mariners, so a vacuum has continuously been created, most of us now who went through that system are now aging generation, so you find out that the next thing that NIMAREX wants to do now is to organize a summit of all retired mariners nationwide, marine engineers, master mariners, marine radio officers, marine radio electrical electronic engineers, we will take ourselves on a retreat somewhere away and try to identify all the issues relating to this aspect of dearth of skilled manpower and let those of us who have gone through systems that produced us think of how we can help existing establishments and government to salvage the situation before we pass off and this is very key. There are solutions, I said earlier on that this country has close to 500 floating assets, if there is no national line, these are fleets that we can use to cover the gap created by the demise of national line, but it takes government’s political will to make that happen. Some of us are getting old, some of us are retired but not all of us are tired, even those who are tired are still intellectually sound, some of us will be willing to go to the maritime academy in Oron for instance and donate one day a month as I have been advocating. I challenged the ministerial committee that came to my office that I will be the first to donate one day a month to go to the Maritime Academy of Nigerian in Oron and support the teaching staff there and bring in some of my own knowledge to help produce properly- educated mariners passing out of the school. So in this summit, it is going to be one of the things that we will be looking at, there are some of the old people who are not doing anything, but are available, Yaba College of Technology was initiating something and this is time to match on it because you can have all the ideas and money, but if you don’t have the intellect to drive it, it is a waste of time. But people are not talking about these things, sending our children to Malaysia on board ships is not the solution, so the NIMAREX that you have talked about will be playing such and other similar roles, one hopes that the entire industry will understand where we are going, because by the time we finish this it is going to impact positively on everybody, there are other things that we think we can look at and tackle quarterly, but we feel this particular issue is the biggest issue that the industry has and something needs to be done about it.
It appears to me that you also subscribe to the fact that government is not giving any attention to training of maritime professionals
I have said few things which I am going to repeat here which if under the military regime I would have been locked away somewhere, but thank God we are in a democracy. When you have a nation such as Nigeria where; from the minister of transport to the permanent secretary and director of maritime services and the relevant deputy directors in the maritime sector down to the regulatory agency such as NIMASA; the director general and all the three executive directors, among all these cadre of people that I have mentioned there is not one professional and that is where the problem is, the problem is not that government don’t want to, the issue is that the government we have do not know, and you cannot try what you have no knowledge about, everything have been so politicized that professionalism has been thrown through the window, it doesn’t happen in any developed country and that is why you find that some of the efforts being made to address the problems are not yielding results because the people making the efforts don’t have a clue. Until we address this, we will keep groping in the dark, and since politics determines everything in this country, what we can do therefore is to make our own little efforts privately which is the NIMAREX initiative; to help the system and not to fight the system, I am very emphatic about not fighting the system but helping the system to solve the problem, this is where the problem is. When all the policy makers and implementing executives and executive directors are not mariners, we have killed it from day one, though they don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to be a minister and I can never hold a public office, I have a flourishing business I want to stay with but I will still say it because it affects the whole country, you called a committee to address the problem of the sector and there is no mariner in it, I don’t need to say anymore but this is where the problem is.
Let’s have an insight into who Engineer Greg Ogbeifun is, how you started and how you climbed the ladder.
Since my higher school, Edo College in Benin I was lucky to win a Shell/BP scholarship of those days to go and study marine engineering which was in 1972. I was with Shell tankers in UK until I got my second class ticket and I went to Kuwait to work for another company, but Shell wanted me to come home, so after my ‘chiefs’, Shell offered me a job which I didn’t like, I thought I was not being exposed enough so I went back to Kuwait, but in 1982, a British firm then recruited me, basically I did marine engineering, I came back and worked for three years and during that period I was accredited as a surveyor by registrar of shipping, I did this until 1986, when I started my own business, I started buying old crap tugs and refurbished them myself and I use to lease them out, this was how I started, I had some falls; ups and downs in the business , one thing I saw happening when Nigerians started getting involved in this business is that we are beginning to acquire old bottoms.
• To be concluded next week
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