By Ade Jacobs
The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) and the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP), are to partner in the fight against piracy and other crimes in the country’s maritime domain, the Director General of NIMASA, Dr. Bashir Jamoh has said.
Jamoh disclosed this in Abuja during a working visit to the interim Sole Administrator of PAP, Col. Milland Dixon Dikio (rtd). He underscored the importance of collaboration among relevant agencies and communities in the quest for maritime security.
He said, “we should be working together in partnership to help us appreciate and evaluate the challenges from our various perspectives and collectively come up with solutions that would work for all of us, and the country at large.
“Security problems more often than not have a local content. So, as the country’s maritime regulatory agency, we want to partner with the amnesty programme, which interfaces with the littoral communities, to nip the security challenges in the bud, and stand our nation in good stead for the optimisation of our huge maritime resources. We cannot proffer solutions to the issues and crisis in the Niger Delta without the collaboration of the Presidential Amnesty Programme.”
The maritime agency had recently established a Maritime Intelligence Unit, MIU, to help in the identification of early warning signs in order to prevent security breaches in the littoral areas. The assets were deployed under the Integrated National Security and Waterways Protection Infrastructure (the Deep Blue Project) with intelligence gathering capabilities through air, land and sea surveillance.
NIMASA, Jamoh said, is also planning to introduce educational, entrepreneurship training, and skills acquisition programmes in the areas of fishing, clearing and forwarding, and legal bunkering, for people in the coastal communities as a way of empowering them and discouraging criminal tendencies.
On his part, Dikio commended the agency for its vision and commitment to maritime security, expressing the willingness of his agency to partner with NIMASA, especially in the empowerment of the local communities.
Dikio urged the agency to ensure that its training targets relevant stakeholders in the oil bearing region so as to make necessary impact, adding that nodal officers from PAP and NIMASA must interface to fast-track the actualisation of the partnership for the overall good of the maritime sector.