Abuja – Mr Charles Uwadia, President, Association of Marine Engineers and Surveyors (AMES), has called for the improvement of standard in the maritime sector in line with international standard.
Uwadia made the call on while speaking with newsmen on the sideline of a visit by a delegation of the association to the Ministry of Transportation in Abuja on Monday.
He said the way forward for the industry was training professionals and not compromising the international standard of the industry.
“We are having a summit on April 14 and during this summit, we want to look at the holistic review of what is happening in the maritime sector.
“There is decline in the sector in training and meeting up with best practices required by international standard; most of our vessels are not up to standard.
“People come in with rickety vessels and most importantly, what we want to address in this summit is that we are going to look at the need to be re-trained.
“We want to see how we can meet up with IMO regulations; we still have single hull vessel used in Nigeria trading on Nigerian waters just because we don’t have the financial capability to upgrade our vessels to double hull.
“But not withstanding, we should not compromise safety and compromising safety means not meeting up to the international standard.”
According to him, the way forward is to improve standards through training, adding that no nation can move forward without training.
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“In the maritime industry, we are 50 years behind compared to other countries in the world; we are way behind and we need to catch up.”
The president said that there was need to review the industry in terms of human and technical capacity for quality service delivery. (NAN)