It would be most beneficial for Nigerian shipowners operating in the sub-sector to concentrate on the tanker trade than operating liner services, the Chairman of Integrated Oil and Gas Company, Captain Emmanuel Iheanacho, has said.
Iheanacho said this in Lagos while speaking with Journalists on the need to encourage modular refinery establishment as part of measures to improve the oil and gas sector services.
Iheanacho said: “From my experience, one area we should have just mastered easily, arising from the activities involved is the tanker trade, because the tanker trade is so easy, you carry only one cargo, one Bill of Lading.
“All you have to do, is to be able to take the ship to a port, stop the ship there, load the sip and sail the ship out of the port and then to another port.
“So, it is not as difficult for instance, as if you were operating a liner service, which requires you to carry thousands of containers and in each of those containers you have thousands and thousands of small goods and you have the administrative requirement to be able to sort all of those things out and make sure that you go to the port at the right time, and you deliver to the person who owns the cargo, at the right time.
“There is really a lot that we could have done to harvest and to develop our shipping potentials, which can still be done.”
Speaking on human capacity development for Nigeria’s maritime industry, Iheanacho lauded efforts of the Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron, Akwa Ibom, for providing high-quality training for cadets.
He, however, advised that it was needful for the Academy’s output to be linked with national capacity, in whose case the need for owning vessels becomes very important.
He said: “Nigeria has done quite well actually in building human capacity. The Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron, is there. The Academy provides a good training group for people who wish to pursue a career in the shipping industry.
“ I think that what really should have been done would have been for the Academy’s output to be hooked on to a national capacity where we bought tankers, similar to what we did with the general cargoes vessels in the Nigerian National Shipping Line (NNSL) so many years ago.
“We in the industry have actually put up campaign to ensure that we participated in the carriage of Nigeria’s trade goods; not only were we supposing that it would give us the opportunity to make money, but it would also create the opportunity for us to acquire engineering and technical skills, it would create a perfect opportunity for us to hook on to what is done elsewhere. So how do you process these linkages?
“If a Nigerian registered tanker and Nigerian crude tanker picked up cargo from here and to America, what are the standards that are required? So, there are so many things that we are losing , because we were just satisfied with just selling the oil , allowing that others would do the job while we would have actually done that job and made significant profit from participating in that business.”
In response to a proposed merger of the Nigeria Customs Service, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), and the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Iheanacho said that could best be understood as a “slip of the tongue.”
“To be honest, I think it was a slip of the tongue. I can’t understand the basis upon which anyone would propose to merge NIMASA, FIRS, and Customs Service. NIMASA is an organisation that is set up to develop shipping capacity, an organisation set up to regulate safety and sea-worthiness. So, I cannot understand how you would propose to merge NIMASA with the FIRS and then with the Customs.
“The FIRS is a revenue-generating agency, collecting money on behalf of the government, and the Customs to a certain extent it does that. If you are talking of merger, maybe between Customs and the FIRS, that would be understood, but if you throw in NIMASA, then I think you will be playing in the realms of speculation, if you do that,” he said.
