Plans are afoot to revive the Nigerian National Shipping Line, wrecked two decades ago by corruption and mismanagement. The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, the mastermind of this planned rebirth, said at a maritime technical summit in Lagos last month that a committee to drive the project to a logical conclusion would soon be set up. This is a misplaced priority, given what is involved and the challenges of the moment. As a result, the country should be spared the trouble of creating another behemoth of waste.
It is unfortunate that the Buhari government is taking the country back to the obsolete system of command-and-control economy. It is time to make fundamental changes in the way this government manages the economy. What is needed is to enact reforms that will make it easier for capable private companies to replace inefficient state-owned enterprises in strategic areas of the economy. We need to modernise our policies by encouraging more private initiatives and greater competition through open market economy. The world has changed over the decades and a command-and-control approach to economic management will not produce the results we all expect.
The minister’s effort to resurrect this dead horse, however, is not the first. After its liquidation in 1995, the National Unity Line replaced it in 1996 with just one ship — MV Abuja. It could not survive beyond 2005. Since the minister assumed office about six months ago, he has not hidden his desire to oversee the return of all our national carriers, in the air, sea and the railway. But the railway renewal, which began under the immediate past government, has been riddled with a N1 trillion contract scandal, into which the Eighth House of Representatives recently launched an investigation.
Maritime trade is the backbone of international trade. With Nigeria being import-dependent and with a coastline of 853 kilometres, it is beyond any question that it is an important maritime centre. This explains why maritime activities at our ports have been going on right from the colonial times but dominated by foreigners. To buck the trend, Nigeria set up the NNSL in 1959. The motivation was not just economic or the control of its external trade; but national pride.
But what went wrong with the NNSL? The Federal Government made a mess of it when it brought its operations under the control or supervision of the transport ministry. Thus, a full commercial enterprise was subjected to civil service bureaucracy. This was evident in the appointment of members of its board of directors. Experience and training did not count for much, as did political consideration. Also, its staff strength was bloated; where a foreign vessel had 18 crew members, between 33 and 44 persons managed an NNSL vessel.
To consolidate its operations within the framework of the Third National Development Plan, which commenced in 1975, the Federal Government in 1977 awarded a N176 million contract — a huge sum then — to Hyundai, a South Korean firm, and Split Yard of Yugoslavia for the procurement of 19 ships of the same model. As of 1980, it had 27 sea-going vessels. Ironically the number declined to just 13, as lack of maintenance of the fleet, seizure of vessels abroad by creditors, ageing of the vessels bought at the same time, and sale of 10 of them to either service debt or refurbish others became the order of the day. Even when 10 ships in its fleet were sold as of 1989, its staff strength was not pruned. Not a few personnel were caught overseas in drug trafficking and smuggling using the national carrier.
Therefore, the Federal Government should go no further with this project, as it has been demonstrated over the years that the country grossly lacks the discipline or culture to manage a state enterprise. If the ruinous narrative of the NNSL is not sufficient for the minister to learn the necessary lessons for a rethink, he could be persuaded by the chronicles of the defunct Nigerian Airways, Nigeria Telecommunications Limited, our ailing four refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna and two parastatals under him — the Nigerian Ports Authority and NIMASA — two havens of corruption and abuse of office between 1999 and 2015.
Shipping business should not necessarily be a state enterprise. Countries like Greece, Japan, China, Germany and Singapore, the largest ship owners in the world, have demonstrated this. Therefore, the argument in some quarters that establishing another national carrier will help in providing jobs to the teeming unemployed is not persuasive enough. Job creation is a domain in which private enterprises have a better track record than the government. To unleash these jobs, government could help indigenous ship owners to grow their businesses through a broad range of incentives and an enabling environment.
A total of 600 vessels are operating in oil and gas; and only 10 per cent of them belong to Nigerians, according to Niyi Labinjo of the Nigeria Indigenous Ship owners Association. In June 2015, the body sealed a pact with Greek ship owners to acquire 40 of their ships of different tonnages, whose ownership would be transferred to Nigerians after two years. Constantine Kokkos, a Greek, whose country’s economy is in a tailspin, in Lagos for the agreement, said, with that pact, attention had been shifted to setting up a maritime college and a ship yard. This is laudable; and the government should lend its weight to this partnership.
Instead of thinking of another national carrier, Amaechi should saddle himself with the performance audit of all the agencies in the sector — the Maritime Academy of Nigeria at Oron, Akwa Ibom State, NPA, NIMASA and the profitability of ships with the Nigerian flag. The outcome is bound to be a brutal reminder that a national shipping line at this time, even as a joint venture with the private sector, is decidedly, a misadventure.
