In the News:
EDITORIAL.
Obstacles facing Rehabilitation of the Nigerian indigenous shipping sector.
In February 2009, a group of concerned stakeholders in Nigerian sea trade met in Apapa Lagos and formed the Nigerian Shipping Roundtable. The formation started as a coalition of the willing, coming together to prod government to see the enormous losses piling up against Nigeria due to the fact that her indigenous shipping companies have collapsed and their former workforce relegated to scant achievement of their supposed sectoral output. In monetary terms, we are talking of billions of dollars in lost revenue from the freight that ought to be earned by this sector.
Since the formation of the Roundtable, communication of its existence as a new think-tank has been made to higher quarters and all federal maritime and transport parastatals. This is a prelude to a planned mobilization of national consciousness and galvanizing of the responsible agencies to implement national laws that command proactive public sector support for a private-sector-led emergence of a strong maritime nation. However, some tough challenges face the success of the Roundtable’s bold initiatives.
These challenges are political and socio-economic in nature and are similar to the problems that beset the advancement of the entire nation.
On the political front, there is the lack of leadership and political will. General Babangida’s signing of the National Shipping Policy Decree in 1987 filled in that role at the time and provided a fillip for many shipping lines to form and begin to operate. That singular action gave Nigerians in the shipping sector confidence to strike out in the knowledge that he has government legal backing. But the passage of years and a lack of sustaining visionary management of the policy whittled the drive. It is now all but diffuse and without spot-on trajectory.
This however is not surprising because the malaise in the sector is a reflection of the national one: Nigeria has come to lack the ready availability of born or charismatic leaders, to free her from the scourges of avoidable poverty or to convert her natural endowments to wealth. There is an abysmal lack of efficient national managers of men and resources, gifted with rare acumen and political sagacity to make a difference in the sordid Nigerian situation. The nation undeservedly lacks such leaders, and the same, ipso facto, can be said of her shipping industry. But the leading lights in the sector should rise up to this challenge.
Secondly, the socio-economic challenge inheres from the effects of the political obstacle. In the absence of guaranteed socio-economic security, most indigenous shipping operators, like most indigenous operators in other sectors, patronize self-help and look out solely for themselves. The attitude is purely individualistic and atomistic, hardly national or patriotic in outlook. Some may argue that this strategy, in the circumstances, is logical, altruistic, even reasonable. But is it not also myopic? Do successes gained by this hand not turn out to be short-lived? Is it any wonder therefore that generations of such petty successful empires built on individualistic foundations die with their chief executives whereas the chief competitors in the trade, the increasingly organized foreign shipping lines, continue to prosper and feel invited to dominate the free bazaar that has become of Nigeria’s and West Africa’s enormous shipping market? Where the competitors are combining to form mega companies that can hold their own turf anywhere around the world, Nigerian shipping interests are in plurality and disarray, more talkative than active and without any certain goals or destiny.
But the story need not end in such a gloomy parlance. Professor Claude Ake, in his copious treatise on African political economy, correctly diagnosed the inglorious role of the colonial policy of economic disarticulation of the productive stream in the colonies in such a way that European finishing centres were always interposed before the completion of the production chain. This legacy became inbred in the newly independent nations in the 1960s and till now continues to perpetrate traces of discontinuity amongst economic centres of the same nation. Otherwise, how can cargoes from the ongoing multi-billion dollar NIPP project, for example, not be hauled by indigenous shipping lines if not because shipping laws are not being implemented by the Federal Ministry of Transport, the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources and all the agencies in between? Or how can indigenous shipping lines be complete outsiders to international shipping of the Nigerian crude oil resources if not because of the lack of political will and an astute national management of political resources as nations like Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or even Kuwait have done?.
However, we must hope in the promise of a new millennium when new things are happening; it’s a long way from those times of yore about which Professor Ake wrote. What is needful in the Nigerian situation, especially for the restoration of her indigenous shipping trade? This would be the emergence of youthful visionary administrators in the responsible ministries and agencies of transportation, energy and petroleum resources. Our leaders should emulate the Nassers and the Ghandis of old, or in more recent times the Mahathir Mohammeds and the Lee Kuan Yews of this world, or even the recent leadership revolution now flowing over Ghana. The Nigerian shipping sector needs the helping hands of visionary management at the maritime parastatals if her indigenous operators hope to be revived and claim their share of the international cargo affreightment market.
The few successful indigenous maritime operators would do well to see, in aspects of foregoing analysis, the end-game of their little growing empires unless they strive to engineer favourable national policies anchored in law, which should make buoyancy and sustenance for the indigenous shipping trade. If they come together to pressure the political sector, it will turn out to everybody’s advantage and re-float grounded carriers that went down in the gale of contrary political weather.
We enjoin the conveners of The Nigerian Shipping Roundtable to rally to the good cause and make hay while the sun shines, and not end up like all the other groupings that merely manage to sit by and watch the continuing of our national commonwealth.
