The United States Coast Guard on Wednesday held a crucial meeting with the Management of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) during which they assessed the facilities at the nation’s ports in relation to their compliance level with the International Ships and Ports facilities Security (ISPS) Code.
Ms Hadiza Bala Usman, Managing Director of NPA who made this known in chat with newsmen in Lagos hinted that the team was in Nigeria to assess the situation at the ports adding that they were coming back in February 2017 to carry out another assessment on the ports at which point they would provide grading for the nation’s terminals.
Usman who observed that the agency was on top if the development also said that the agency had communicated to the terminal operators whom she said were very much compliant with the Code.
According to her, “On obligations to the ISPS Code, we are very much aware of that, we are mindful of it, we have been leading in compliance on ISPS Code. As I apologize to you this afternoon, one of the meetings we had was with the US Coast Guard and they had come to look at our facilities to see our level of compliance with ISPS Code.
“We are very much familiar with that, our GM Security is so much on that, he is actually with the team from the US Coast Guard to assess the situation we have at the ports. They are coming in February to D another assessment on which point they will provide grading for our terminals. That is something we are on top of and we have communicated to the terminal operators and they are all very much complaint on ISPS Code”.
On Command and Control Centre recently commissioned by the Minister of Transportation, the NPA boss pointed out that that was the agency’s Information Technology (IT) platform which not only capture vessels as it relates to payments but also highlight security concerns.
She averred that the platform had been very useful on providing the agency with data on security and the exact location of vessels even as she said that they had linked it up with the agency’s payment platform which she said was not fully effective yet but assured that they were working to see the Command and Control Centre linked to capturing the revenues as well as having the exact revenue that were attributable to it.
“We are working on that. One of the things I said during the commissioning was that whatever IT platform we have, we have to deploy it across board our operations. If we deploy X billion naira, we have to get value for money ensuring it is utilized by all our services I.e. finance, Harbours etc. The security needs to key into this platform for us to get the maximum benefit.
“We at through with the project phase 1 need to be fully operational to optimize the value of the resources which had been deployed to the Command and Control Centre”, she said.
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