Peterside: Appraising NIMASA one year after
A year ago, President Muhammadu Buhari appointed Dakuku Peterside to take up the mantle of leadership in the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety (NIMASA) as the director-general. He was given the mandate of reforming and restructuring the agency into a respectable maritime administration.
With his appointment, it was expected that he would position the agency to deliver on its mandates of becoming an effective maritime administrator in the area of maritime safety, achieving cleaner ocean; search and rescue operations, capacity building, and ensuring efficient shipping services, among others.
On his arrival, the Peterside-led NIMASA administration developed a 3-year guiding principles tagged, ‘Medium Term Strategic Growth Plan,’ built around the core mission of NIMASA which was based on the above mentioned objectives, the guiding principles were geared towards achieving sustainable growth and development of the maritime industry.
Peterside growth plan was built on five pillars including survey, inspection and certification and transformation programme; environment, security and search and rescue programme and capacity building including growing indigenous tonnage, ship building and human capacity. It also aimed to digitalise the agency; and to ensure structural and cultural reforms including changes to work ethic and attitude of staff.
In all of these, one thing came out clear and that was the need to improve on turnaround time of vessels calling Nigerian seaports from NIMASA’s end. The Peterside-led management started nursing the idea of ceding powers for approving ship sailing certificates and payment of ship levies by shipping companies and oil majors to the zones, which before now must be done in NIMASA head office in Lagos.
The former, according to shipping liners, was very cumbersome and time consuming, which also leads to loss of valuable business time and less productivity. To achieve efficiency in this regard, the management appointed substantive directors to head the zones and to ensure that more responsibilities were delegated to the zones thus reducing time, cost and delay involved in allowing shipping agents to shuttle from their base to Lagos to obtain clearance.
To digitalise NIMASA operations, the management has put plans in place to ensure full automation of all NIMASA operational and payment processes. At the flag off of the platform currently being constructed, it is expected that stakeholders will be able to register their vessels and carry out all other transactions with NIMASA at the comfort of their offices or homes.
Online transactions with highly sophisticated security measures are being encouraged by this administration. And we have upgraded Nigeria’s subscription of the Lloyds list intelligence to enable stakeholders’ access to current data in the maritime industry, said Peterside in Lagos recently.
The agency, according to him, has been working hard to ensure that NIMASA as the Designated Authority (DA) for the implementation of the International Ships and Port Facility and Security (ISPS) Code in Nigeria, improves the security in the ports in line with global standards. He expressed delight on the high rating of Nigerian ports by the United States Coast Guard (USCG) that recently visited the country for audit of Nigerian ports and facilities.
Nigeria in the past five years has been out of the IMO Council, thus downgrading the country at the international politics among maritime nations.
As part of the repositioning strategy, NIMASA will in the coming month bring together, the heads of African Maritime Administration in Abuja, for the 3rd Association of African Maritime Administration (AAMA) conference. This move will go a long way to enhance the chances of Nigeria returning to IMO Council at the Category C level.
“We have gotten presidential approval to seek election into the category C of the IMO council. With these Nigerian maritime sector will be repositioned to take its lead in the comity of maritime nations. And the new NIMASA, would be unveiled by President Buhari on the 22nd of April which coincides with the hosting of AAMA,” Peterside added.
Also, the current management subjected NIMASA to International Maritime Organization (IMO) Member State Audit Scheme (IMSAS) in June 2016 and Nigeria was rated very high after the exercise. IMSAS is a scheme developed by the IMO to assess the extent to which a member state complies with its obligations set out in the various IMO instrument to which it is a party.
Also, the management received the approval of the board of directors to commence the construction of new offices at the Port Harcourt, the Eastern Zone and Warri the central zone.
On Cabotage implementation, as the new NIMASA management has demonstrated absolute commitment to the disbursement of the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund (CVFF) to funding indigenous shop owners and building shipping capacity.
Adewale Ishola, a master marine, who noted that the current management of NIMASA has good plans towards developing the maritime sector especially in building on the foundation of the predecessors, called for prompt disbursement of the CVFF to make funds available for indigenous ship owners.
Ishola further added that time has come for the DG to call up the lists of the 21 shipping companies formerly selected by NIMASA few years back, for upgrading and repair of their fleet, so that Nigerians can actively participate in shipping business. “Shipping requires credit facility with a competitive interest rate of single digit. Our banks want to make returns in a very short-term, making it difficult for them to invest ship acquisition, thus the need for the disbursement of CVFF.”
Uzoamaka Anagor-Ewuzie