The Nigerian Government through its Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) has announced the commencement of a digital manifest management for all ships berthing at Nigerian ports, in a bid to standardize operations of Nigeria’s shipping industry.
This was disclosed in a statement on Monday by the Director-General, Dr Bashir Jamoh, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.
He stated that the agency plans to completely phase out physical transactions with cargo manifests and Sailing certificates
What NIMASA boss is saying
NIMASA boss revealed that in line with the Federal Government’s Executive Order on Ease of Doing Business, they are committed to improving turnaround time of vessels, reduction of human interface in majority of the transactions with stakeholders.
“This is in our bid to ensure transparency and professionalism that the sector requires to grow.
“We have improved our operational relationship with our sister agencies. As we speak, we have made tremendous progress in our determination to convey sailing clearance for vessels to the NPA electronically.
”We also receive and process manifests electronically. This has improved efficiency leading to improvement in the turn-around-time of vessels calling at the nation’s ports,” he said.
He added that the process of submitting and processing manifests was reduced from 72 hours to five hours for Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) and larger container vessels, which he says has marked improvements and it is still work in progress.
Benefits of the new system according to NIMASA includes the total digitalisation of all the agency’s processes expected to be completed by 2022.
In case you missed it
Recall Nairametrics reported in November last year that the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) introduced new measures to check security threats in the Nigerian maritime industry.
As part of the measures, ship captains operating in Nigeria are required to submit the Security-Related Pre-Arrival Information (SRPA) forms to the agency not later than 48 hours before the ship’s arrival at any Nigerian port.
