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As the National Assembly foot drag in the passage of the National Transport Commission Bill (NTCB) currently at the floor of the House, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has started the process of drafting a single legal framework that will bind all players and government agencies in the nation’s maritime industry for proper coordination and development.
The proposed legal framework tagged the ‘National Maritime Transport Policy’ (NMTP), when passed would help to provide framework towards addressing the challenges militating against the growth of the maritime sector.
Speaking in Lagos on Monday at the opening ceremony of a three-day workshop organised by the NIMASA and the global maritime regulatory body, IMO, to guide Nigeria on how to draft an internationally accepted maritime policy, Dakuku Peterside, director-general of NIMASA, said the proposed policy would help to bridge gap created by lack of a single document to coordinate the roles of agencies of government in the sector.
“The roles of all the players in the maritime sector are interwoven and there is need for us to have a common guiding legal framework, which is lacking in our body of policies. We have a National Transport Commission Bill (NTCB), which captures the visions of land, air, water and rail transportations and the maritime sector, but we do not have a standalone policy that addresses all that is needed for the maritime transport sub-sector to grow,” Peterside said.
NIMASA, according to Peterside, has identified that there is a gap that was why it went to the IMO, which gave the agency some professionals from the World Maritime Academy (WMA) to guide them towards articulating all that is needed to move the nation’s maritime sector forward in one policy.
Peterside, who identified piracy sea robbery and maritime crimes as among issues limiting the growth of the sector, said that Nigeria has taken a decisive action that recently led the Federal Executive Council (FEC) to approve the Integrated Waterways Maritime Security otherwise called the Presidential Initiative on Maritime Security that involved $186 million to provide the agency with the right tools and resources needed to fight piracy.
“With FEC approval, we will be able to acquire the assets to develop the needed capability to deal with criminality on our waterways and I am optimistic that in the next 18 months piracy will be history.”
Delivering their goodwill messages, both Sani Yerimah, chairman, Senate Committee on Marine Transport, and the counterparts in the House Committee on Maritime Safety, Education and Administration, Mohammed Umar Bago, promised to do their bid in ensuring that the proposed policy and other IMO’s treaties and conventions that would help Nigerian maritime sector to be competitive, were domesticated and passed into law.
William Azu, representative of the IMO secretary general, Ki Tack Lim, who urged NIMASA to ensure that the National Assembly was part of the formulation processes to enable them understand the importance of the policy so as to facilitate its passage, observed that such policy was very critical to the development concept of blue economy that would enable Nigeria develop capacity for food sufficiency.
AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE
