Mr Sesan Onileimo, former President, Maritime Reporters’ Association of Nigeria (MARAN) has attributed the rise in maritime-related crimes to unemployment of seafarers produced under the National Seafarers Development Programme (NSDP).
Onileimo in a statement on Saturday in Lagos, noted that the programme was by the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA and the Maritime Academy of Nigeria, MAN in Oron, Akwa Ibom State.
Onileimo also the publisher of a leading maritime industry publications, Shipping Position Daily, listed the maritime crimes as piracy, oil theft and other kinds.
He expressed worries over the mass of unemployed youths in the country describing them as willing tools for maritime insecurity.
“There’s a mass of unemployed youth that the society has foisted on us, an idle hand is a willing tool.
“And I will like to look at this from two angles, there are two categories of unemployed willing youths: the ones trained by NIMASA under its National Seafarers Development Programme who were trained, qualified with or without Certificate of Competency (CoC) but waiting to have something to do.
They are there, they want to be active, they are the tools that are being used to foment trouble.
“The second leg are those boys and girls who are trained locally, some of them are trained at Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN) Oron, but there are those that are trained even in Agege here who wear uniforms so much so like that of the Navy.
“They are equipped and recruited into that business that has turned out to be a source of threat to our maritime environment,” he said.
He pointed out that in the course of his years as a maritime journalist, he had a reason to interact with a few of them.
“If you go to Liverpool here, I am sure the Maritime Workers’ Union of Nigeria (MWUN) will bear me witness; the boys and girls who graduated from Oron, who have turned out to be canoe boys, were not trained in Oron to be handling canoe and boats but there is no job for them.
“These are the same boys who had five years of training but afterwards, there is no job. Take that guy to Niger-Delta, he is ready to do anything for as long as the money is available,” he said.
