With a coastal stretch of 853 kilometres (km) and an entire maritime
waters of 210,900km2, including the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), Nigeria’s
local shipping industry has potential for cabotage trading that is only second
to the first in the whole world.
Over the years, operators in the local shipping industry, under the
umbrella of the Nigeria Shipowners Association (NISA), have continued to defend
their claim that the industry could employ up to five million people if
harnessed to the maximum.
As part of its agenda to transform the maritime sector, the federal
government in recent times has only set up committees with tags such as
“presidential” or “taskforce” to assess only trending issues such as delay in
the cargo clearing process and vessel dwell time.
That has nothing to do with the indigenous shipping industry. The Coastal
and Inland Shipping Act, now popularly known as the Cabotage Act, made in 2003,
has failed to fly. Experts say it was high time the federal government stopped
looking the way of committees and begin to formulate and enforce policies that
could drive the local shipping industry.
The president of the Nigerian Association of Master Mariners, Capt. Saib
Olopoenia, said the absence of a transport policy was the bane of the nation’s
shipping industry. A renowned seaman who has timeline familiarity with the
shipping policies of the developed worlds, Olopoenia emphasised that Nigeria
must establish a transport policy to attain a focused direction in shipping
development. According to him, a transport policy would define roles and
responsibilities for the development and growth of a national shipping
industry.
“One of the things is that there must be a national shipping or transport
policy. At the moment, people are just coming with ideas here and there. But
there should be an overall shipping policy for the country, and the role of the
private industry as well should be very clear. This is how we want to go about
shipping.
“There should be a national shipping or transport policy from which the
government and its agencies in the maritime industry as the regulator and
industry players can obtain direction, cutting through various stages of
development at different times,” Olopoenia said.
Such policies, according to experts, should also bear masterpiece plan
for investment in ship building and maintenance, ship scrapping and recycling
as well as industry financing. An industry investor, Capt. Chukwulo Nwaora,
said while Nigeria lacks the requisite facilities with respect to shipbuilding
at the moment, the country could begin by making policies that would favour
building of small crafts and tug boats for coastal operations.
Nwaora said, “At the moment, we have ship repair facilities but do not
have a steel industry in this country. So if we are going to start building
ships, we must have the necessary infrastructure in place to build them. It is
policies that will do this. And of course in the world, not all countries build
ship, there are some countries that are noted for ship-building. What we need
is to have a very strong viral ship repair industry in Nigeria made possible by
well formulated and enforced policies. We can start building small crafts like
the coastal vessels, but when it comes to foreign-going vessels, I don’t think
at the moment we have the capacity to do it.”
Source: Hellenic shipping news.04 October
2014
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