According to Dr. Bashir Jamoh, Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), the agency’s reforms have successfully removed danger zones for Nigeria’s maritime industry.
According to him, the certification was granted by the International Maritime Bureau as a result of the agency’s success in obtaining it throughout the years.
During a recent advocacy visit to the Commission, the DG informed the Commission that he had just met with Dr. Dasuki Ibrahim Arabi, Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR).
The International Maritime Bureau has withdrawn Nigeria from the danger list today, according to the NIMASA DG.
In terms of maritime security, we are no longer among the countries that are the riskiest to trade with.
“By December 2020, there would be one ship attack per day as a result of maritime insecurity.
We had six attacks in a week recorded at that point. By the second quarter, we had reduced attacks on our maritime domain by the most in 27 years.
And by beating 27–30 years of experience by December 2021, we will have drastically reduced our attack by up to 75%.
It gives me great pleasure to report that as of last month (June 2022), we have gone two months without a single attack.
“The international community, international organisations, international cargo owners like Bimco, and the rest came together to sit down and discuss problems and solutions on how to tackle the issue of maritime insecurity.
This is when the joint industry working group was established.
All these reforms helped us achieve the success we have recorded, according to Dr. Jamoh. “From there, we graduated to introduce the Shelve of Guinea.”
He continued by saying that, as required by the government, the agency had adopted a number of reforms over the years, including the element of a sustainable management system.
In order to fulfil their mandate to promote maritime trade, the agency is concerned, among other things, with maintaining their competitiveness and sustainability.
In doing so, over the past two to three years, we have implemented a number of reforms, including the Compendium of Internal Policies and advancements of our own conditions of service, which were just approved a few months ago.
Despite some amendments that prompted the implementation of our own conditions of service, we are currently applying them to the Head of Service to ratify a few issues.
“We made changes to the agency’s infrastructure for communication.
The Customer Experience Center is located on the first floor, where the DG might want to go.
It functions by computerising complaints and enquiries so that we may respond to them and provide stakeholders with the most recent information about what we are doing.
It serves as an interface between agency operations and stakeholders.
And we make improvements where we fall short.
At order to have an efficient service delivery in our own agency, SERVICOM is in charge of the Customer Experience Center.
We also developed a number of tools for infrastructure in terms of assets and environmental safety and protection capabilities. I’m sure the DG needs to be updated on the deployment of the Deep Blue Project Assets.
These are cutting-edge assets that are valued globally, and as a result, many nations have been able to add to what we have established.
“On Monday of last week, I was in the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning to sign an agreement with the Japanese government for the construction of additional security balls worth approximately $2.78 million, donated by the Japanese government in appreciation of the measures taken by the Nigerian government and the agency to maintain maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea.
He continued, “In a similar spirit, the Korean government gave a similar battleship, which we may have to bring to Nigeria at any time.
This also is as a result of the appreciation of the effort the Nigerian government and NIMASA put in to the project.
The BPSR DG responded by praising the agency for the reforms and for regularly responding to his questions and recommendations.
The DG BPSR stated that the Bureau’s ultimate objective was to ensure that by the year 2025, Nigeria ranks among the top 20 public services in the world while discussing the reforms made to the Nigerian public service over the past 20 years.
Arabi claimed that in order to do that, the BPRS created a Self Assessment Tool (SAT) that was used to track and evaluate the performance of government Ministries, Departments, and Agencies with a view to improving Performance.
He disclosed that countries have expressed interest in visiting Nigeria to learn about its experience implementing public service reforms, such as the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).