A day would come when no nation would be interested in crude oil any longer, because the world is yearning for cleaner and renewable energy alternatives. When such an age comes, oil producing countries which refused to develop its other competitive sectors would be caught unawares and would suffer for not preparing for the huge global change which may come sooner than expected.

This was the theme of a keynote speech delivered by Ladi Jadesimi, chairman of LADOL, a mega indigenous oil logistics firm in Lagos, when he chaired the Nigerian Shippers Council stakeholders appreciation night, held recently in Lagos.

A man with passion for indigenalisation, Jadesimi described the global maritime industry as holding vast untapped potential for growth and wealth creation. He stressed added that the sector also holds the key to the sustainable economic development of Nigeria when its potential is adequately harnessed and nurtured, urging the Nigerian government to begin a deliberate and strategic plan to develop the sector to position it as its major foreign exchange after oil.

The LADOL chairman stated that having the longest coastline in West Africa gave the Nigerian maritime sector vast untapped opportunities and that the maritime sector could develop sustainable businesses that would dwarf the revenues from exporting commodities.

 “Across the world, crude oil is increasingly being marginalised and huge pressures continue to mount to move to cleaner alternatives, and renewables. At the same time the maritime sector is offering a wide range of new business opportunities from clean energy to new modes of transportation, logistics and agriculture – maritime sector cuts across almost all other sectors,” he noted, adding that “the maritime industry holds the key to the sustainable economic development of Nigeria by developing the full the potential within the sector across a range of industries”.

He continued, “Whatever we do must be underpinned with strong local content – in today’s world that starts with Nigerians owning, engineering and building the ships we use. It is however demonstrably the case that we have quite a large financial and capacity gap to fill for Nigerians to be in a position to own most of the vessels plying through our waters. Of course, we are all aware of the particular challenges militating against expansion of vessel ownership by Nigerians, the number one hurdle being access to long term finance at a reasonable price. Nonetheless, the opportunities here are considerable and more than sufficient to support the needed investment.”

“Nigeria is ideally placed and suited to become the ship building, repairs and maintenance hub for Africa. This will go hand in hand with ship building. Our local market alone can justify the investments and new facilities needed. This is also an industry that has a significant multiplier effect on long-term job creation. We can just imagine the enormous positive socio-economic impact of developing vibrant wide spread ship building capacity in Nigeria along with manpower training and leading to the gainful employment in the hundreds of thousands of Nigerians.

 “We should borrow a leaf from the Philippines, in many ways comparable to Nigeria in socio economic terms.  As a matter of public policy, over the years they have developed a very robust world class merchant seamen training programme. Today there are tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Pilipino merchant seamen deployed all over the world who remit millions of dollars back to the Philippines year in year out.”

 “Water transportation is yet one more area where our water resources can be harnessed to power industrial development.  Agricultural products rot due to poor logistics and transportation options. With no means to move them to the market efficiently the agricultural sector cannot compete globally.  Roads are expensive to build and maintain.  Thanks to the present Government, the railways are rising again but will take time. We can make use of the water ways today; with a fraction of the investment we would need to make into roads.”

 Jadesimi also outlined the boundless potential of a less spoken about sub-sector in maritime, that is the maritime agro industry. This includes fishing, shrimping and industrial processing, for local consumption and export.