The Association of Licensed Maritime Academies of Nigeria (ALMAN) have made a case for their inclusion on the Board of Directors of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA).
This is has they called on the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Adegboyega Oyetola to recommend to President Bola Tinubu, that a permanent representative of the Association be included as a member of the board.
The Acting Secretary-General of ALMAN, Dr. Musa Akinyemi made this known to Thelensng on Wednesday.
The Association said, the proposal, if granted, will finally address the perennial problems and professional injustices, policy imbalances, and sub-standard regulations-cum-actions and disharmonised training syllabi and options being experienced especially by the private maritime training institutions (MTIs) and practitioners in Nigeria.
Akinyemi said: “If a member of the the Association of Licensed Maritime Academies of Nigeria (ALMAN) is eventually allowed inclusion on the Board of Directors of NIMASA, the perennial on-water and on-land banditry, impersonation, piracy and other maritime-domain-related crimes would have been finally addressed and laid to rest”.
The ALMAN Acting Scribe opined that the proprietors of most of the private MTIs have the most needed data and essential statistics together with national maritime memoirs to back their request.
According to him, “if the ugly trends regarding the manner of shipping practice and maritime safety are to be reversed for near-perfection, to achieve global acceptability, the Federal Government could not achieve any sustainable success whilst discrediting and dishonouring one of its most needed allies, the ALMAN, a united body of absolute stakeholders, the trainers of the future generations of the industry’s captains and core professionals.
“We are pretty-set to enter into a bond with the Presidency, the Federal Ministry of Marine And Blue Economy, and NIMASA over this. If ALMAN’s membership of NIMASA’s Board fails to deliver within the first term, and the government calls it quits, they might not be faulted or challenged”.
He added: “We passionately appeal to the Federal Government, through the Honourable Minister of Marine And Blue Economy to seek audience with the leadership of ALMAN, apart from the Stakeholders Round-Table Meeting we had with him in Lagos recently.
“Let it be clearer that it is already time to now berth and consolidate the arrival and success of Nigeria’s Blue Economy using the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model mainly because if NIMASA alone could not achieve its Maritime Administration (MarAd) mandate without the Nigerian Navy (NN), even so will the Agency be unable to cope with the essence of maritime education vis-a-vis public enlightenment and civil-military imbroglios characterising the maritime practice and marine environment without ALMAN”.
