Expert blames foreign domination of shipping business on lack of import-export database

Absence of database for inbound and outbound cargoes in Africa is one of the reasons why foreign ship owners have continued to have an edge over the African counterparts, said Temisan Omatseye, president, African Shipowners Association (ASA), at African Cargo for African Shipowners’ conference held in Lagos recently.

According to him, there is need to carry out an audit of all African’s incoming and outgoing cargoes in order to empower African ship owners to participate and benefit in the affreightment.

“Nigeria has a lot of youths who are unemployed. We are trying to bring them back to get jobs. The challenge we have is that we do not have an audit of the number of cargoes leaving Africa; we want to get the audit of the cargoes leaving Africa, the amount of money we are paying on insurance. Once we have that information, it will guide us to bring the business back to Africa,” he explained.

Omatseye, who observed that the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN) Oron is training so many cadets without sea time training, also stated that Nigerian cadets, who finish the seafarers’ development programme without a Certificate of Competence (CoC), cannot work as seafarers onboard ships.

“Unless we are able to get the ships to put our youths for sea time, the training they get maritime schools, will be useless. Let us get the cargoes which will allow us to buy the ships, once we own the ships, we can then put our youths onboard the ships to become seafarers,” he assured.

Omatseye assured that the recommendations from the conference including all the identified challenges of national, regional and continental Cabotage; issues of maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea and the Gulf of Aden, will be forwarded to the African Unions’ Head of State meeting in Lome, Togo in March 2016 to form the policies that will drive the African maritime industry.

Also speaking, Samuel Kame Domguia, representative of the African Union Commission, who doubles as coordinator, ‘2050 Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy Taskforce’, said the African Development Bank has given assurance to support the private sector in acquiring vessels so as to fully develop and achieve the Cabotage policy in Africa.

He assured that the new President of the African Development Bank is committed to this agenda and determined to give strong support to African private sector in this field. “It is not just a matter of having ships owned by Africans but these ships should be built by Africans in Africa, and this requires some strong financial support.”

Representatives from 10 African countries including Kenya, Cameroun, Ghana, South Africa, Sierra lone and Tanzania were among other maritime stakeholders in Nigeria present at the Conference.