The Managing Director, Delta Marine Shipping Company Limited, Engr. Commodore Uba Ajala (rtd.) has said that contrary to believe, offshore loan facilities are available to ship owners.
Speaking to newsmen on the sideline of the just concluded Annual Conference/AGM of the Marine Engineering and Naval Architecture (MENA) Division in Lagos, Ajala hinted that although the loans was interest free, it comes with conditions.
He said,” The facilities for us to do good business in this country are available, offshore loans are available, in fact in Sweden and Switzerland, you can get interest free loan but the condition is that the money you get, you will spend it in Sweden to create jobs for their people. They are ready to give you loan so long as you buy Swedish products. If you want ship, you will build the ship in Sweden and they will give you time to pay the loan. It is a way of creating jobs”.
While stating that ship owners can do nothing except with the intervention of the government, he added that local banks had since realized that they lack the wherewithal to determine an investor with the technical know how for loan in shipping business and hardly give loan to indigenous operators.
According to him,” What the banks have found out now is that if they give a loan to someone they believed is a good operator in the industry and the person buys the vessel, like one of them explained in there, somebody bought a vessel, took the vessel for repair, after so many years, the vessel is still there. That means the vessel is gone.
“I took a vessel to Ghana in November last year and it took us 30 days maximum, why? Maybe because I understand how dockyards runs because I came from the Naval Architecture background. So, I know the bottlenecks and I tried to avoid it.
“So, a situation where you have all those things, then you have problem and that goes back to training as we said, building up the manpower because if they want a consultant, everybody is a consultant in Nigeria. If care is not taken, you see an armed robber telling you am a consultant for ship acquisition and you pay him, you will not know until when you have lost your vessel. So the government must intervene”.
While recalling that the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) and the Nigerian Navy are undergoing restructuring, he urged the maritime operators to pray and hope that the two agencies come out better at the end of the restructuring exercise.
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