TheCable

President Bola Tinubu says he believes the maritime sector holds the key to creating opportunities that will turn Nigeria’s growing youth population into a demographic dividend.

Tinubu spoke on Monday at the 43rd annual council of the Port Management Association of West and Central Africa (PMAWCA) conference in Lagos.

The conference was themed, ‘The Role of Ports in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)’.

Tinubu said the meeting came at a time when regional integration is most crucial to the attainment of collective economic prosperity as a sub-region.

“Countries in the West and Central African region have a shared destiny and are largely connected by the same developmental challenges as well as a robust human capital base and natural resource endowments,” the president said.

“We are thus duty-bound by posterity to unite and deploy our resources towards solving those issues that militate against our socio-economic progress.

“Now, one of the resources that we can proudly speak about as a bloc is our maritime endowment. The reality that most of us are either littoral or island states makes the formulation of policies for the optimum utilisation of our waters for the growth of our economies expedient.

“My administration is especially interested in the maritime industry; this was why we created the ministry of marine and blue economy in the first instance.

“I am convinced that the quick wins we urgently need to create opportunities that will turn our youth bulge into a demographic dividend lies in our marine and blue economy sectors.

“Even though we have physical national boundaries that separate us, the waters are a natural source of connectivity and they seem like a subtle providential message that we must work together for the good of all our countries.”

Tinubu, therefore, called for a quick intervention in the area of port operations.

According to Tinubu, after the issues of adequate security and transparency, the one other important factor deciding the competitiveness of ports “is the seamlessness and efficiency with which cargoes are evacuated to and from the ports”.

“This, without doubt, is an area in which port operations in Africa need a lot of intervention,” he said.

“As a government that believes in the necessity of infusing information technology [IT] into public management to aid transparency and ease business processes, we are giving the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) all the backing necessary to fast track the operationalisation of the port community system.

Tinubu also said when IT is deployed, it becomes a precursor to the implementation of the national single window.

He added that full automation is the only way to go if the sector plans to remain competitive in the global maritime industry.