THE Nigerian Association of Master Mariners (NAMM) has called on the Federal Government to come up with a law that will discourage the Nigerian military from burning vessels caught with stolen crude on the Nigerian waters.
President of NAMM, Captain Tajudeen Alao, who made this call in an interview with newsmen in Lagos recently, said burning of vessels caught with stolen crude by the military is an emerging trend which needed to be tackled frontally.
Alao argued that this practice would have been acceptable about 20 to 40 years ago, when the international law on recycling and scrapping of ships was not in place, saying that in the last 10 to 15 years, there’s been some conventions on bumping including the Hong Kong, the Nairobi and the London conventions.
According to him, “We must make this issue a national issue and then come out with a guideline peculiar to our situation. It is illegal to operate a phantom ship, a ship without identity. It must be illegal to carry cargo that has no origin and if the penalty is severe, it will be a deterrent.
“It is at the extreme where you burn a boat and then you pollute the atmosphere and release sulphur into the atmosphere, thus destroying the ecosystem. The consequence is more than the trading profit. So, we need to come out with a guideline, a properly documented guideline. What are the implications? what are the scenarios? We need to sit down and do the flow chart, because this is an emerging issue.”
Insisting that the Navy had a responsibility to say that an act had been committed and thereafter destroy a ship, Captain Alao maintained that the act did not amount to destroying the evidence.
“That a ship was caught with crude oil, where do we keep the crude oil? The oil companies don’t have facilities where you empty the products into. So, that product, eventually, water will enter into it because the ship is not seaworthy or they will remove the product and put water into it and there will be no product. That product is the most important thing, it must be evacuated but to where? To the local refinery? To whose storage tank?
“Contrary to insinuations in some quarters, the Nigerian Navy had been destroying ships for a long time. The Navy had been burning canoes, wooden boats, makeshift boats, steel boats, barges and so on. But what we are saying is that in view of the law on recycling, it should be discouraged. Then, a procedure must be established to allow the cargo to be evacuated to somewhere,” he stated.
On those condemning the act of burning of vessels by the Navy, he said, “The people crying that they are polluting their water are the culprits. They know that this business is endangering the ecosystem and their livelihood, then, they should be in the forefront to stop it. But they are the ones collaborating with them because it’s an easy means of livelihood.
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