NISA to float N207bn fund for assets acquisition

By Godfrey Bivbere

The Nigeria Ship-owners Association, NISA, is set to float a $500 million (about N207 billion) in the first quarter of next year.

This is part of measures by the group to reposition itself in a bid to curb the dominance of shipping business in the country by foreigners.

Disclosing this in Lagos, a member of the team constituted for the repositioning of the body, Ayorinde Adedoyin, said the process for setting up of the fund is almost completed.

According to him, “We have been working on a fund called the Nigerian Maritime Fund, NMF. What we are trying to do is to pull funds together, about $500 million, and I think we are almost there and what the fund will do is that with the fund we can acquire assets for operations.

“It is not only vessels; we can acquire axillaries of the shipping industry and own it. It is not all about the Cabotage Vessel Financing Fund, CVFF; we hope and pray that by early next year the NMF will have come to fruition,” he said.

Another member of the steering committee and MD of Panafric Ocena and Energy, Tunji Brown, said they have put in place measures to ensure that genuine ship owners and not foreign fronts are brought back to forestall the problem that bedeviled the association in the past.

He stated: ‘‘Where we are today is a function of government neglect because they are the regulators of this sector but we believe that they should be part of this association to develop the shipping industry with us but every effort we made in the past hit a brick wall because of personal interests.

“We have ship owners and we have associate members, we are bringing everybody together because we cannot have ship owners without the associate members supporting us like offshore logistics platforms, surveyors, master mariners, and some of the operators.

“We are bringing everybody together because that is the core mission and vision of this association.

‘‘Most of those other members have their own association too but because we are ship owners, we need them and they need us, we brought them into the association and we want to continue with that.’’

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