CONSULTANT, Policy Advocacy and Media Communications, Governor’s Department, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Prof. Ken Ife and Chief of Naval Staff Vice Admiral Awwal Zubairu Gambo have called for more synergy between maritime agencies and public private partnership (PPP) to actualise the sector’s potential and security.
They spoke at an ongoing conference on Maritime Security and Transboundary Management Course at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos.
Director General of the NIIA, Prof Eghosa Osaghae, who welcomed participants to the event, said the forum is germaine to national security and exploration of abundant resources in the maritime domain.
In his paper titled, Enhancing Nigeria’s Maritime Industry for Improved National Prosperity, Prof. Ife drew attention to the maritime economic opportunities, including challenges, size of the economy globally and regionally, with focus on Nigeria.
He lamented that avenues to boost the economy through the sector are yet to be explored.
The CBN consultant, who also spoke in an interview with The Nation on the margin of the conference, said: “Our economy is like three times underpowered. And there is so much more we can do, even with our current capacity, if only we can get it right because it involves many agencies and we are not synergising in such a way that we can unleash the potentials.
“I described Nigeria like a 30-metric tonnes truck being driven by a Volkswagen engine, totally underpowered.
I have shown all the parameters to explain how the economy is underpowered and how much more we can do to create jobs and become regional maritime hub in Africa, which will also drive our economy.
“Over 80 per cent of the economic activities and supply chain come through the sea, the maritime.
“And the maritime sector we are looking at here, the ecosystem alone is three times bigger than the size of that economy and we have just been scratching the surface.”
Recommending a development bank, he said: “We don’t have a national structure in mind. People need money to build the whole ecosystem. We need money to build, maintain and service ships, hire vessels and possess national shipping lines.
“Those are a long-term capital at single digit rate. We need a development bank to do that. The sector was the worst hit last year with -40 per cent loss to over 60 per cent recovery, now which shows that recovery is on the way.
“We now operate at a higher trade volume than pre-COVID-19 period. But we need to do more because we are like children worried about their future. We have potentials being wasted with little economies like Ghana, Togo outperforming Nigeria.
“Togo is five per cent of our country while Ghana is 15 per cent of our economy. But all going beyond their weight and we keep hearing Nigeria is a sleeping giant.”
Calling for PPP, he noted: “Many of the things needed will be done by engaging the private sector.
“The plan depends on leveraging the private sector. We need to reach out to the private sector with our strategy and get them involved. It also has to be a multi-agency approach because many agencies are at work in the maritime sector.
“For instance, we can’t expect the government to do the deep seaport; it will be the private sector. But they want to do it knowing that there is a predictable policy framework and the stakeholders are on the same page, harnessing the human resources potential.
“Nigeria is trying in some of the performance indicators, but not all where the investment should go like the logistics performance index.
“More work needs to be done in all the seven pillars, particularly technology, timeliness, maritime, transportation services, transportation infrastructure among others.
“Revenue from patch is only three per cent and oil revenue to government is three per cent making it six and the average in Africa is 18 per cent. So, we are already below what we should earn.
“The weakest link in the Nigerian economy is the link between primary production and manufacturing, so that we will reverse the trend of dependence on 80 per cent of importation of raw materials.
“We need to link the industry and the processing to primary production like solid minerals, refineries, processing the agro-products to bring the necessary infrastructure to enable all these to be exported.”
Vice Admiral Gambo, in his paper, “Nigeria’s Maritime Security Governance – Exploring the Challenges & Opportunities of Nigeria – Cameroon, Benin & Chad Relationships”, said Nigeria has explored the international framework for Maritime Security Governance (MSG), following the surge in piratical acts in maritime domains across the different regions of the world.
For instance, he said the direct consultative meetings between Presidents Boni Yayi and Goodluck Jonathan resulted in the prompt staging of “Operations Prosperity” by cutting out the bureaucracy that often characterise bilateral agreements.
Also, he noted that the Gulf of Guinea (GoG) maritime space is huge and capital intensive to patrol, but the advent of the facilities of ministries, department and agencies (MDA) have “greatly reduced the need for vessels to be physically out at sea on patrols, while greatly enhancing mission-specific deployment of vessels for the interdiction of maritime criminals based on credible and actionable information/intelligence made possible by national MDA facilities”.
The naval chief said: “The information sharing framework of the YCoC makes it much easier for maritime criminals to be interdicted within the GoG by member states, thereby reducing the erstwhile huge costs in patrol logistics on the basis of presence at sea, rather than vectored interdiction at sea.”
He said Nigeria’s partnership with Cameroon and ECOWAS member-states has assisted the countries in their quest to defeat a common and shared enemy: the maritime criminals in the with the Gulf of Guinea (GoG).
Senior officers from the nation’s security agencies are attending the workshop.
