Despite Population of 200Million, Nigeria Contributes Less than 0.5% to Global Seafarers Pool

…The need to Export Seafarers to earn Foreign Exchange

By DAPO OLAWUNI

There are indications that Nigerian seafarers all over the world are less than 0.5percent, even as the country’s lack of indigenous ships have led to foreigners taking over 99.9% of freighting of goods in and out of the country.

Chairperson of Nigerian Shipowners Forum, Mrs Margret Orakwusi stated this at the 2021 Symposium organised by the Mission to Seafarers (MTS) Lagos last week.

Orakwusi stressed the need for Nigeria to train more seafarers and export them in order to earn foreign exchange.

According to the ship owner, with Nigeria’s population of 200million people, and its young men and women wallowing in unemployment, there is a need to train more of the youths and expose them to seafari g profession

She also called for government support for indigenous practisioners to own ships.

Speaking, she said “The truth be told, we do not have ships in this country, when I say we do not have ships, I mean indigenous ships, we still rely on foreigners, and because of that, they take almost 99.9% of freighting of goods in and out of our country”

“We need to enable Nigerians to own ships.

“In the aspect of seafarers, all over the world, there is a shortage, in Nigeria we are looking at our population of over 200million people, but what are we contributing to the world? I am sure that it is less than 0.5 when it comes to seafarers”

“The question we have to address is; how good are we treating the few seafarers that we have? During the Covid-19, most of us were in the comfort of our homes, but some of these seafarers were at sea, crew change became a problem, people didn’t think about seafarers welfare”

“This is why we applaud the Mission to Seafarers Lagos for the good work they did at that time”

“To the young men and women that are seafarers, there is a lot of job opportunities out there for you on the international market, there are some countries that are landlocked countries, but they earn a lot of foreign exchange from the salaries of the seamen that they have sourced outside

“Nigeria with a population of 200people, and with our children looking for jobs everywhere, we should think about training more of them, we should also think about owning our own ships” she stated.