Vincent Toritseju
Lagos — The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA, has commenced moves to rejig the ship scrapping sub-sector.
Speaking with a group of maritime journalists, Director General of the agency, Dr. Bashir Jamoh, said that he did not know the ship scrapping sector was such an active sector until an incident that he refused to disclose occurred.
Jamoh disclosed that the agency has been inundated with complaints of illegal ship scrapping activities on the nation’s waterways adding that NIMASA was now in the process of renewing the licenses for firms so as to regulate such activities.
He said: “What we are doing now is to study the number of companies that are in legitimate business to operate scrapping yards.
‘‘From there, we will take a stock of these numbers and we will have to review our own requirements and guidelines regulating the operation of scrapping yards.
‘‘We are now building our own guideline with regards to ship scrapping, so very soon, we will make our position known through the publication of a Marine Notice.’’
Recall that the issue of unregulated and illegal scrapping of vessels is currently going on unsupervised and the development has led to some level of lawlessness on the nation’s waterways.