By Godfrey Bivbere

FORMER Minister of Interior, Capt. Emmanuel Iheanacho, has called on the Federal Government to give indigenous ship-owners access to single digit loans to enable them compete with their foreign counterparts.

Iheanacho, who disclosed this to Vanguard in Lagos, said that foreign ship-owners get single digit loans for ship acquisition as against their Nigerian counterpart who gets the same facility at double digit interest rate.

He noted that the present situation is responsible for the dominance of shipping business in the country by foreign ship-owners.

Iheanacho, who is the Chief Executive Officer, CEO of Genesis Worldwide Shipping, said the advantage of the foreigners means that there are able to get loans for the acquisition of any vessel they require as long as the business is available.

He therefore called on the federal government to prioritise inclusion and empowerment of Nigerians in the shipping sector because of the importance of shipping to economy.

Capt. Iheanacho

According to him, “You know times are tough now, to find the dollars is not easy at all. It is difficult for us to find the resources from Nigerian banks, they have capitalisation issues.

“The problem is not lack of skill, we have the skill and it is the resources. If the government believes that they need to internalise thetransport element of their import and export trade so that we can save money instead of spending money by giving foreign ship-owners money, we can give that money to Nigerians and create job opportunity at the same time.

“They will have to invent in us by lending us money not dashing us money; we are not interested in having free money.”

On how much the Nigerian economy is losing through the domination of shipping business by foreigners, the Genesis boss said it is some huge and almost impossible to compute.

“It is impossible, it is very huge. I cannot as we are sitting quantify it but if sat down I could put down some numbers. I can tell you it runs into hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions.

“If you look at it as a percentage of our international trade, if you take the shipping element to and fro, it will be 20 percentage of our international trade. If you look at the volume of our international trade and apply that percentage; you can see what we are losing, it is huge.

“In a situation where we are looking for alternative avenues to employ our people, in a situation where we are looking for opportunities for technological awareness and capacity, we should not just sit down and accept that ships come into our ports and go out but we should be asking how owns all these ships? Who is working onboard all these ships? Are there Nigerians that can stand up and be counted?