Executive Director, Finance and Administration of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA, Bashir Jamoh, spoke with Godfrey Bivbere on efforts of the agency to explore the benefits of the Blue economy, gave update on the NSDP and much more. Excerpts:
The blue economy, how far has the management driven it, what is the advantage to the Nation?
Well, the blue economy as you are aware is a new dimension that we are targeting and interestingly the new dimension that is in the pipeline now. The developed nations have already embraced it for so many reasons. One, it is an aspect that we wish to embrace because we want to harness more revenue for the economy than we are having which has to do with the resource under the seabed. We need more revenue and if you are following government program, you know that they have been trying their best in terms of Agriculture.
Everybody knows that they have gone far and they have achieved a lot in terms of that policy and so the second aspect of what the maritime industry is trying to promote for a long time is the issue of the blue economy. As am talking to you now the Director General is already in Nairobi in Kenya to discuss the issue of the blue economy and we are trying to chart a course to ensure that this blue economy will become a success in our environment, especially in West Africa so that we can have Africans relying heavily on the resources we have in our own economy. Around August 2018, I launched a book harnessing the Nigerian Maritime.
This book address basically issues that do with the blue economy. There are resources we have in our territorial waters, so those are the things that we are doing. You ask what the gains, its enormous are, Gross Domestic Product, GDP will to go up, and this will have a rippling effect on the economy.
Now apart from these, the decline which is currently being experienced in this country will be taken care of to a large extent. You can look at the size of our population, when you look at the increase in population annually, our economic growth despite the fact that there are lots of gaps there which we need to fill. So you are following our own forecast, the forecast we did which will end towards 2019, we started another forecast now that will address the issue in 2019 to see what we can realize. You see the enormous asset that we have and the size of the asset which is about N9.1 trillion annually. The 2017 forecast indicated that, so the benefit of this blue economy is something that without any hesitation people will embrace it.
