MR Adebambo Ademiluyi, the President/Chairman of Council, Centre for Marine Survey, is set to sanitise the marine industry.
The seasoned marine surveyor is set to flush out quacks who have infiltrated the noble profession, and wreaking havoc on many unsuspecting local shipping companies now biting their fingers after patronising them. To do this, Ademiluyi said the body is working hard to get a legislation that will empower it to license anyone who wants to practise as a marine surveyor.
He added that the legislation would also determine the milestones that should be tracked before the licence of a practitioner is renewed.
He said the licensing is vital because payments for ships are processed only after the surveyor has expressed his or her satisfaction, adding that the services of a professional marine surveyor is often expensive to procure and quacks often take advantage of that to offer poor services at a much reduced rate. “These quacks have ruined many local shipping companies as they advise them to buy unserviceable vessels at very exorbitant prices since they are not experts. Today, so many local shipping companies are indebted to banks. Banks are also crying. Someone comes to you and claims he is a marine surveyor, you don’t assess him thoroughly and probably because his charges are much cheaper, you go for him. He offers you non-professional advice and soon you discover the vessel he inspected and passed for a good one is actually a scrap. It does little or no work and packs up. You can’t pay back the loan and you still require more money to get back in operation. Before you know it, the company folds up. That is what we want to check”, he said.
In this interview, he speaks more about the body and the maritime industry in general.
Excerpts:
Marine surveyor
A marine surveyor is a person who conducts inspections, surveys or examinations of marine vessels to assess, monitor and report on their condition and the products on them, as well as inspects damage caused to the vessel and cargo. So it means a marine surveyor holds a prestigious position and is held with much regard in the shipbuilding industry.
However, in Nigeria, what happens usually is like what you heard, people cut corners and when you want to buy a vessel, you actually should use a proper surveyor whose report is backed by integrity, that is he will be able to stand by whatever report he writes about that vessel. We have cases where surveyors go to Europe, to wherever and they are compromised by people who just go out there, collect money and then come back to say a vessel is good, when in actual sense, it’s not.
You might have also heard; a lot of those vessels have ended up being towed into Nigeria because the surveyor that was sent was either compromised or not a proper surveyor. Proper surveyors are expensive. In my company, we turn down jobs because if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Nigerians like to pay peanuts and they get a survey report on a vessel that is not good and the vessel on the long run does not even make the trip to Nigeria not to talk of work within the waters of Nigeria.
High fees
Marine surveyors are expensive for many reasons. First and foremost, it costs money to train them. You have to be a graduate and that is vital. You just have to possess a minimum of HND or Bachelors Degree, which costs money to acquire. And on top of that, you must get certification. To be certified, you have to be mentored.
The mentorship program in most companies is about two years and in those two years the surveyor is put through a lot of experience. He goes to sea, he gets an allowance every day while at sea, then he gets paper works, lectures and training and all that.
By the time he is coming out to say I am a marine surveyor, the company that trained him has spent a lot of money and with years of experience, he becomes more and more expensive.
Training
Of course, as a surveyor, you must continuously train yourself, every three to four years, you go for more certification. There is IIMS in the UK; so many bodies that give training and International Federation of Inspection Agents and all that. To even sit for the exam alone, I think its about 2,500 pounds. You cannot get that kind of certification and then somebody is offering you half a million to write a report for him to buy a vessel. You will just tell the man he is a joker and walk away. So, that is the problem we have in Nigeria. Whereas, where you are turning down people with N500,000, you will find people who will agree to do it for N250,000 and they give you report that the vessel is good and at the end of the day, what you bought is just a hull. May be not even a proper hull but a hull that is leaking.
Weeding out quacks
This time now, we are registering members, we are encouraging our members to carry their badges, we are encouraging the companies to use the logos on their letter-headed papers, we are talking more and more about it to our customers that if you don’t see logos on letter-headed papers of companies, don’t use them.
With that logo, we stand by what we preach. In our next stage now, our members are going together to procure professional indemnity insurance that covers members of the centre. So, when a group say we have insurance worth ten million US Dollars, a hundred million US Dollars, anything we write for you, if it is not right, come and make claim and that gives confidence to the process.
Cooperation
There are foreigners in the industry, but we have a problem not with the foreigners, we only have problems with the Nigerians who use their services. For instance, I went to submit a bid in one of the government parastatals, they asked for bid and I went there and they sought to know what company and I mentioned the name of the company.
They asked further if it’s a foreign company and I said it was wholly indigenous they weren’t happy with that. What is wrong with wholly indigenous companies carrying out marine surveying? Is it rocket science? Even this foreign companies in inverted commas; how many expatriates do they have in Nigeria? They have just one sitting in his office. It is the Nigerians in the companies that do the survey. So, the foreign companies are coming here to take away the big jobs, to take away the big money and we Nigerians don’t recognise the Nigerian professionals who are licensed to do this thing.
Today, you have some of the best master mariners that have been produced anywhere in the world. Sea-worthy, tested officers and they are Nigerians. The marine engineers at the top today are Nigerians and these are the people who had the best training all over. So, we are saying that the companies in Nigeria should make use of the services of indigenous surveyors.
Legislation
We are looking forward to legislation and we are working towards it so that we can have an institute for marine surveyors in Nigeria just like you have ICAN, just like we have Nigerian Institute of Architects, Institute of Quantity Surveyors and things like that.
If we have that, it will help because that way, we can have people who would say I am certified by the Institute of Marine Surveyors, Nigeria and we can hold that person responsible and by the time we get to that level, quackery is going to disappear because if you don’t parade that certificate, then anybody who is using you does that at his own risk.
Awareness creation
We are going on a roadshow starting from next February. We are going to the press, we are going to the banks because banks are suffering this thing. They sit in their offices with their white shirts and tie, they don’t know and somebody brings a report to them and they stamp and release two billion naira to go and buy a vessel and that is the end of story. We will go to banks! Financial institutions, we are going round to make sure that people know about us and our practices and what we can offer to the maritime industry and Nigerian society.
Relationship with IIMS
The link between us is that today, there are quite a number of us who are individual members but we want to go beyond that to have a Nigerian chapter of the International Institute of Marine Surveyors and that we will achieve at the next board meeting in London where we are supposed to submit our application and get back.
With that, we will have access to training, we will have access to more certification, we will have access to serious networking with marine surveyors worldwide and that opens us up more to the world. So, that’s the link between us and that is what we want to achieve by partnering with them.
Local content
The way out of it actually is for the agencies that are supposed to ensure that it happens begin to get involved, get to the nitty-gritty of it and ensure that the Act is complied with.
Like I said before, all the crude measurement today is being done by foreign companies. That shouldn’t be; crude is volume of a hull of a vessel just like they measure diesel, kerosene, petrol; same way you measure crude. The things that are different are parameters like intensity and so on. So, it is not rocket science but again they talked about insurance, talk about integrity and these are the things that we are telling them. Integrity of the Nigerian marine surveyors is there. There are marine surveyors in Nigeria who have integrity and who can deliver the goods along the line for the Nigerian Content Act.
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