Captain Sunday Umoren is the Secretary General of the Abuja MOU for Port State Control for West and Central Africa Region. In this interview with our correspondent, Saint Augustine Nwadinamuo, he bares his mind on the achievements of the body since he assumed office few years ago, how much he has done to drive the body to progress and so much more. Excerpts:
What could you describe as the highpoints or achievements of your administration in the outgone year?
Very good afternoon to you and thanks for coming around to visit us at Abuja MOU. We know the meaning of Abuja MOU – it’s Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control for West and Central Africa Region.
With respect to assessment of what we have done, I will link that up to our mandate because that will determine what we are supposed to do, the expectations of the stakeholders.
Critically, the main mandate of MOU regime, we have nine MOUs in the whole world and the whole world is partitioned Into nine different regions and ours is for West and Central region, having 22 countries geographically in the region.
The main mandate is to ensure that no substandard foreign vessel trades within the region. What does that mean? When we talk about substandard vessels, they are vessels that don’t meet international standards, vessels that don’t comply with IMO and ILO Conventions and those are the vessels that could easily get involved in accident, those are the vessels that will expose your environment with respect to pollution and other maritime related issues.
With respect to our achievements, the first bait could be the fact that the MOU system is like a net. So, if you have 22 countries like we have in our own region, the 22 countries should be a close-nitted net such that no substandard vessel can break through. So, what does that mean? The first level of success will be in having all the member states, all the countries sign up as full members.
So, last year, since I came onboard, we succeeded in having three countries that came onboard as full members. so, currently, we have 20 members which is 20 out of 22. Which means we have still have two left and we will talk about the remaining two. So, having three countries come into the family is a great achievement because you are tightening the net.
What are the names of these three countries that came onboard as full members?
The countries are Equitorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Cameroon. They all came in within this period. So, we still have two countries left – Arab Republic of Mauritania and the Republic of Namibia.
So, having 22 expanded membership means having countries that will be inspecting those vessels to ensure that substandard vessels are filtered out. We have also moved ahead to, because membership is one thing, conducting objective inspection is the major aspect of it because that’s actually the only way you can nip substandard vessels.
So far, we have had 14 countries inspecting, we are working on getting more countries to inspect. With respect to Inspection, we have two levels of inspections – the normal port state control inspection which is based on IMO conventions. Currently, we have 16 conventions that form the basis of our inspection – what we call relevant instruments.
So, you have to get the countries to ratify and domesticate those conventions for them to be able to inspect vessels based on those conventions. So, we are working on getting more countries domesticate more conventions to be able to inspect.
And then, there’s also the one we call Concentrated Inspection Campaign, CIC. Every year, we pick up a specific area of shipping to focus our attention on. To that also, a number of counties involved in CIC. So, we have gotten more countries to be inspecting vessels. And then, even the countries that are inspecting, we have numerical increase in the number of ships inspected. Take for Ghana – in 2022, they inspected 131 ships, in 2023, they inspected 168; Liberia inspected 54 in 2022, 68 in 2023; Nigeria moved from 648 to 666; Cameroon moved from nothing to 122 because Cameroon just joined. You know, we just crossed over, 2024 annual report is not out yet.
So, we have had those improvements and increased inspection regime which really means a lot to us. So, that’s an aspect of our achievements.
We also move to the fact that look, when I came in, we noticed that some countries were actually struggling with respect to capacity building while some countries were doing extremely very well. So, we came up with Mentor-Mentee scheme to which countries that are doing well, will mentor other countries. So, the countries kick-started last year by Nigeria mentoring Sierra-Leoneans. About six of them came to Nigeria, spent about two weeks with NIMASA and we’re mentored.
So, that project has kick-started and more countries are lined up ready to be mentored. So, that is our own way with respect to increasing the number of inspections being conducted, capacity building based on improving the quality, yes, because we could just go and shabbily walk around the vessel and say hey! My inspection is done. It’s not quality inspection because what is quality inspection is that which meets the objective. It’s that which the inspector will not miss any nin-conformity.
Another thing that will bring about quality inspection is the objectivity, the integrity of the inspectors. All the MOUs, we actually have Code of Conduct for Port State Control inspectors and we happened to be the first MOU to collaborate with Maritime Anti-Corruption Network, MACN, a body set up to rid the shipping sector of corrupt practices. So, we collaborated with them, had a training session for Port State Control officers and in fact, this year, other MOUs have lined up for them to also do the same thing for them.
So, that has actually helped us, we have been doing trending to see the see the impact of that training because from the MACN report, you will have a full report of how countries perform and yes, the countries in the region were not really doing very well with respect to conducting the inspections in objective and with high level of integrity. There were some issues being raised, these issues were flagged out. So, we have gotten that done.
We also succeeded in getting the ILO – International Labour Organization to conduct a training for our Port State Control officers. ILO has the mega convention called MLC 2006 which has to do with the welfare of the seafarers. We have had a lot of issues with seafarers being abandoned, seafarers not being paid their salaries when due and so many issues. Plus the condition of living onboard the vessel not meeting international standards, the feeding not meeting international standards and the sanitary condition onboard the vessel being questionable.
So, we engaged ILO, it costs us two years to eventually get them to conduct the first ever training for Port State Control officers which was for Abuja MOU region. I think this year, the Paris MOU and Indian MOU are also lined up for such trainings. So, we had made serious inroad with respect to capacity building because if the output of their inspection also depends on the quality of inspectors you have.
Policy Makers- it’s good thing to have your inspectors being knowledgeable, being ready to work but if the policy makers don’t support them, then, you are going to have a big problem. I give you a typical example, a vessel is to be detained, somebody can be bold enough to pick up a phone because he’s in a position of authority to call either the DG of the Maritime Administration. Don’t forget, our inspectors are from the Maritime Administrations, so like in Nigeria, the NIMASA Port State Control officers conducts our inspections for us. In Ghana, the Ghana Maritime Authority PSCOs handle that inspection for us.
So, a politician or anybody could pick up a phone and then call the guy and say,my friend get the ship off unless you don’t like your job, you keep the vessel. So, there could be such issues. So, we have succeeded in getting IMO to conduct a training for the policymakers. It was supposed to have a repeat last year but it has spilled over to this year. So, hopefully, in the first half of this year, we will be able to have that training for policymakers. Because once you have the policymakers having a buy in, then the Port State Control officers will be bold enough to conduct their inspections without fear.
So, a lot of things we have, we have not missed our meetings – the Port State Control Committee meeting is an annual conference of all the Port State Control officers sharing ideas, learning from each other. We had one in Congo Brazzaville last year, we also had the Ministerial conference held in Congo Brazzaville for our members States. We have cross-pollinated with other MOUs, having a share in the training of our Port State Control officers.
In fact, from this year henceforth, the MOU regime is looking at expanding the Mentor-Mentee programme from intra to inter such that Abuja MOU could easily send their Port State Control officers to go to Paris MOU. So, the MOU system is somehow moving away from that regional to international, having one group because the bottom line is harmonization of Inspection regime so that whatever you face in Nigeria, should be what you face in Cameroon. But if you have variance with respect to how stringent an inspection is, you will have what we call port shopping in which ship owners will say I am not going to Nigeria, I will be going to Cotonou. I will rather go and drop the cargoes there and so, the freight to Cotonou will be lower and freight in Nigeria will be higher.
But when you have a harmonized system, it means wherever you go, you can’t run away from the long arm of the law. So, there are quite a lot of things we achieved last year and we are looking forward to doing more of it this year.
…To be continued…
Photo: Captain Sunday Umoren, Secretary General of Abuja MOU on Port State Control for West and Central Africa Region.
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