Indications have emerged as to how the management of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) as well as other factors contributed to high rate of students’ failure in examination for award of the Certificate of Competency (CoC).
It will be recalled that the Director General of NIMASA, Dr. Bashir Jamoh reeled out the statistics for the year 2020 and 2021 to journalists during a session with them last Friday in Lagos.
According to Jamoh, a total of eight hundred and twenty-nine (829) officers cadre sat for the examinations out of which two hundred and sixty-four (264) officers forming a percentage of 32 percent passed while a total of five hundred and sixty-five (565) candidates forming a percentage of 68 percent failed in the year 2020.
He added that a total of two hundred and forty-six (246) certificates were revalidated in 2021.
“Gentlemen of the press, you can see a very serious and negative figures in terms of our students sitting for professional examination of different certificates that we are recording of which amounts to up to 68 percent failure.
“The agency is studying and liaising with various institutions to see how we can address this gap. There are so many factors attributed to this and we hope that before the middle of 2022, we will overcome those challenges.
“In 2020, officers examination, total number that sat for that examination was 610 and total number that passed was 251 forming a percentage of 41 percent while 359 failed amounting to 59 percent failure.
“The total certificates revalidated was 132. That means for 2021, we have 246, a considerable increase has been recorded.
“Then, for officers rating, total number that sat for the exams was 1,251; 926 passed representing 74 percent while 325 failed representing 26 percent failure.
“Examination for Rating for 2021, total number of students that sat for the exams was 1,327. That means a sharp increase as against the previous year of 2021 of 1,251. Total number of candidates passed was 990 forming also 74 percent passed. Total number of candidates failed was 337 with percentage of failure at 56 percent”, he said.
However, findings revealed that the attitude of the management of NIMASA towards the students preparing to sit for these examinations and towards those preparing them for such examinations also contributed to the poor outing by the students in the exams.
According to the President, Nigerian Association of Master Mariners (NAMM), Captain Tajudeen Alao, who spoke in an interview with our correspondent in Lagos on Tuesday, the statistics released by the NIMASA DG should not be contested by anyone as according to him, a Unit in NIMASA – Seafarers Standard that conducts the examinations has the data of different cadres and the CoC they sat for adding that the results also went through moderation and the final outcome was what they presented to the DG which can be verifiable.
Alao, however, posited that the agency ought to do something differently by subsidizing the cost of sitting for the exams for the students to reduce the psychological and emotional pressures on these students.
He argued that the promotional function of NIMASA was not for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as according to him, it was originally meant to promote shipping since the students were for the shipping industry.
“Some of the people to go for the exams have no job. There are so many people who could not go to school because there’s no money to upgrade their certificates hence the industry is suffering, the industry will have shortage. As we identify them, we should support them.
“You finish your sea time, you have to go for exam. Then, you go for preparatory course for the exams for six months in school to be able to face the exam. So, to survive as a private student, you don’t have money and the school itself that is going to take you, how prepared is it?”, he queried.
The NAMM President while insisting that examination is a product of preparation as well as knowledge impacted on the people queried the last time NIMASA trained examiners even as he pointed out that NIMASA should have structure similar to that of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and not just having a unit without academic structure.
He continued, “Have they train any of them (lecturers) in PGD or Diploma in education? Have they sent them to Egypt, Canada, UK, Australia for on the job training? No! We have been agitating for retraining since 2004. So, the lecturers, do they go on sabbatical? Do they have exchange programme with functional training institutions?
“We want the best, we want to compete. So, we cannot localize, we must put energy. We have an academy (Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron) that is good now, we also want lecturers. We must be seconding people from NIMASA to Oron and they also should come back to the field. That is how the examiners get used to new trends. If they go onboard, they see new ships. So, they are up to date.
“The lecturers also must have that exposure otherwise they will be talking out of fashion. We cannot just sit down one place and say we are doing… We started examination in Nigeria in 2004, foreign going, we are approaching 20 years, we will need to upgrade. We cannot stay at that first level, we must get to second and third level and when people work here and you are training them for international trade, they are limited in exposure.
“Even we, we have not been given refresher courses by NIMASA. We have been crying for it because when you train for the industry and as many people are relevant, you carry them along.”
He, however, equally blamed environmental factors and the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 as partly responsible for the poor performance of the students in the exams.
According to him, “How prepared are the students? The school that is training them, how prepared are they?The standard of the examination is per IMO model courses. The examination questions are international, so, if the preparation does not meet the standard of the exam, naturally, people will fail.
“And if there are environmental factors like the climate, Covid-19 and all that, it will affect the outcome of the exam. Most courses, they did them online and they are going to write the exam physically and remember, this is the first time, in fact, taking the courses online is to bridge the time so that no time is lost but it also has consequences.”
On what his association is doing to help change the trend, he said, “We still offer mentorship, we advise but we are not in government. We can only talk. Captain Ishola is our member, he is at Oron now protecting the standard and stakeholders’ interest. Not only our members in NIMASA or government, they also take examiners from Master Mariners and from the Marine Engineers also, they are there.
Photo: Captain Tajudeen Alao, President, Nigerian Association of Master Mariners.
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