Former Chairman of the Association of African Maritime Administrations, AAMA, has called on African nations to work at growing their economies and increasing their seafarers’ base to grow its global trade participation over 2.5 percent.
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| Sobantu Tilayi |
The former Acting AAMA Chairman, Sobantu Tilayi, who disclosed this in Abuja during the association’s conference, decried the fact that Africa presently controls 2.5 percent of global trade figures by volume and less than one percent participation in the global maritime industry.
According to him, “We must increase our participation in the global trade and the only way to achieve this is to increase our economies, the number of seafarers coming from South Africa, Nigeria among others and also the size of our Gross Domestic Products, GDP, in relation to the various economies in the continent.
“Another way to achieve this is to increase our participation, increase our tonnages, that is the number of ships on each country’s fleet, increase the number of ships registered in our flags, we should also ensure that our laws are aligned to international best practice, we enthrone a regime of ease of doing business in the various countries in the continent.
“Africa’s contribution to the world trade is to the value of the trade of the countries in the continent, we control 2.5 per cent of global trade figures by volume and our participation in the maritime industry is less than one per cent.
“We have also insisted that the regional economic communities manage to have maritime articulation in their various strategies and I think that that in itself has managed to get us into the profile raised for the maritime industry.
“If you go by the reports from Nigeria and South Africa and I also do know that in Kenya, the number of seafarers is beginning to increase, the number of people employed in the maritime industry is also beginning to increase. All these have been the value of our efforts.”
He further noted that AAMA has managed to get the entire maritime industry to discuss in the league of maritime nations in Africa. You know, those of us in the Association of African Maritime Administrations AAMA have work tirelessly in the African Union AU, to make sure that the association itself takes off.
On AAMA, Tilayi who is also the Acting Chief Executive of South Africa Maritime and Safety Agency, SAMSA, said “we were at the formalisation stage of the association, we have fully established it now and we also need to begin to institutionalise the association. There are various programmes we are already working on.
“We need a programme of action for the association, we need to address issues of capacity development, research and issues of policy alignment and industry participation, among several others, and these are the things we wish to achieve from this conference. At last if the framework to achieve these objectives should come from this conference, then it is a success,” he concluded.
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