‘Why Maritime Academy terminated sea experience agreement with SOAN’

THE Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN), Oron in Akwa Ibom State recently pulled out of an agreement with the Ship Owners Association of Nigeria (SOAN) over provision of sea experience for cadets of the Academy. In this interview with select maritime journalists, including Nigerian Tribune’s TOLA ADENUBI, the Rector of the Academy, Commodore Duja Effedua, sheds more light on why the agreement was terminated. Excerpts;

PRIOR to your re-appointment for a second term of four years in office, some people raised a campaign of calumny against your person and office, accusing you of embezzling public funds. What do you have to say to this?

I don’t even know these people. You see, people want access to the funds of the Academy. This is what has been on for decades before I came, but because I came and stopped all these illegalities, I became public enemy number one. However, this is only to the criminal elements in and around the Academy. The Nigerian Police Force (NPF), the Department of State Services (DSS) and even the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have done so much in hunting down some of them. Many of their frivolous claims have been subject of investigations and most of them have been found to be fake and baseless. Those allegations were deliberate just to stop my re-appointment as Rector of the Academy; but by God’s grace, I am still here. Four of those making such baseless allegations are on the run; two have been arrested and are in court. I am not at war with anybody. Their main collaborators are within the Academy; that is staff in the Bursary, Audit, Works and Procurement department of the Academy. If there is money to be stolen in the Academy, we won’t be able to put in place all these structures and assets that we have assembled in the last four years. Most of them now know that you just don’t wake up and make frivolous allegations against anybody. If you must make such allegation, you should be ready to defend it. So, due to the ordeal of those in court, others have kept mute.

 

During the 2021 graduation ceremony, the issue of provision of sea time came up. Even though it is not the responsibility of the Academy to provide such, as a retired Naval Commodore, is there a possibility that the Academy can benefit from your relationship with the Nigerian Navy since the Navy now builds ships?

We are into talks with the Nigerian Navy right now. They came here recently for some discussion. Part of our agreement with the Navy is that we will provide Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW) courses which will make them certified internationally for civilian duties in addition to their military duties. In return, the Navy will help us with our boat yard and also help us in our Engineering Faculty which seems to be our weakest link for now, and we hope to tackle it headlong in 2022. For the Nigerian Navy to be able to build not one, two or three ships, it means they have evolved; and we as a training institution can benefit from their wealth of experience. The Nigerian Navy officials were supposed to come and inspect our boat yard last December, but because of our Passing Out Parade/Graduation Ceremony, they couldn’t come around. Hopefully, before the close of the first quarter of 2022, they should have come to inspect our boat yard. For the sake of clarity, it is not the duty of the Academy to provide sea time for cadets. Our job is pre-sea time training. Provision of sea time is the duty of the maritime administration and the stakeholders who will employ the cadets. You can see Engineer Greg Ogbeifun, he has already given automatic employment to two of our best graduating cadets during the 2021 Passing Out Parade ceremony. This means that those two will get the needed sea time. The ones that graduated last year (2020) that he gave automatic employment to, he described them as fantastic. Engineer Ogbeifun is not somebody anybody can easily please. For him to describe the ones he employed in 2020 as fantastic, and also employed two cadets in 2021, it means they must have been exceptional onboard his ships. So, if we have twenty ‘Greg Ogbeifuns’ in Nigeria’s maritime industry, that means twenty cadets would have secured automatic employment onboard ships. We pray other maritime stakeholders turn up and provide capacity building for these cadets.

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There was a recent agreement between the Academy and members of the Ship Owners Association of Nigeria (SOAN) to provide sea experience for cadets of the Academy. Is there any update on that?

The truth is that I am no more interested in that agreement with SOAN. I had good intention and we started well, but one company, decided to defraud the Academy. The company took money but did not provide the required sea experience as stated in the agreement. Rather than refund the money like others who couldn’t meet up with the agreement, it  chose to go to court. I am so disappointed because the owner of that company has children. Why would you deprive the children of other Nigerians opportunity for progress in life? Some companies collected money from us, but because they had very busy schedule and there was no space to train our cadets, they returned the money. it was tossing us up and down. They will ask us to come to Lagos, we will be in Lagos, and then they will say we should come to Port Harcourt. At a point, we had to ask them to give us our money because the siwes programme which was for four months was already over. We had to take the company to court and the case is still in court as we speak.

 

What are you going to focus on in your second term in office?

Eighty percent of my time in my second term in office will be dedicated to capacity building. Ten percent of my time will be dedicated to maintenance of the infrastructure and assets that have been put in place here. The remaining ten percent of my time will be focused on looking out for innovations that can improve the Academy. Have you people been to our Occular vision room? We have gone international in terms of what we can offer. We can now take people into a virtual world. It’s just a pity that some people who don’t wish this country well will never see anything good in what we are doing here. Recently, I organized a trip for some of our Board members to go on a tour of the Regional Maritime University in Ghana. When they came back, they said what they saw is not near what we have at the Academy. Like I always say, we are not in competition with anybody. Nobody should see us as a rival. We just want to build capacity. Whether people like it or not, we shall soon be a regional reference centre with time. All we need to do is continue building capacity.