Mr Emmanuel Jime, Executive Secretary, Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), says the council will deliver more quality services when corruption is tackled.
Jime said this on Wednesday when the Head of the Technical Unit on Governance & Anti- Corruption Reforms (TUGAR), Joan Onwulere, led her team to visit him in Abuja.
According to him, corruption among other challenges is limiting the progress of Nigeria’s Maritime sector and this needs to be tackled.
While commending the TUGAR team for the good job there were doing, Jime pledged the continued support of the NSC to the team to measure sanity of the maritime industry.
”Let us also be aware that there is still several ways to go, there is a lot of work left to be done.
”What we do at the NSC, because of the important role we play of regulating the commercial sector of the maritime domain, there is no way we will deliver on quality services if those services are mitigated by the incidences of corruption.
”We are together in this and it is a battle that I believe is winable, but we have to carry on with this work to its logical ends.
”I want to thank you for coming and to assure you even more that whatever is needed as far as support from the shippers council is concerned.
”By way of funding , by way of provision of equipment to the best of our ability that we have been able to do till now, we can only continue to do and do even more,” Jime said.
According to the NSC boss, the work of TUGAR aligns with the desire of President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration, and the NSC and every well meaning Nigerian should support it.
On implementation of Nigeria Port Process Manual (NPPM), the executive secretary said one of its challenges was that the NSC was the only agency bearing its burden.
”I regret to say that the greatest challenge perhaps you may face going forward is that the shippers council appears to have been bearing the burden of the implementation of the port process manual single handedly.
”This is supposed to be inter-agency platform, and so we can use this platform to appeal to all of the other agencies of government that are partners to what we do to also join shippers council in assisting.
”So that we do not have the kind of challenge on funding that we are having in this present time.
Earlier the head of the TUGAR team thanked the NSC for the level of support it had received in the past and appealed for more support going forward.
According to Onwulere, the team had since inception and through the support of the council achieved a lot of milestones.
She listed some of the achievements to include training of corruption risk assessors, launch of the corruption risk assessment report, Port Service Support Portal (PSSP), the recently launched NPPM among others.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the TUGAR is comprised of the Ministries of Transport and Finance, NPA, NCS, NIS, NIMASA, NDLEA, CRFFN, ICPC and BPP.(NAN)
