Director General of Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dr Bashir Jamoh has been named winner of the 2020 Zik Prize in Public Policy.
Making the announcement last week, in Lagos, the Chairman, Selection Committee Zik Prize 2020, Professor Pat Utomi said the capacity of the Director General to have extensively managed the restructuring, reformation and repositioning of NIMASA earned him the prestigious award.
Prof Utomi stated that the Deep Blue Project and the Blue Economy initiatives Dr Jamoh “continues to champion have brought massive gains to the Agency and the nation’s economic diversification goals.”
The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) in its second quarter 2021 report had disclosed that piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, which had in recent times become the global epicentre for sea piracy, fell to the lowest since Q2 2019 after the Dr Jamoh started enforcing the Integrated National Security and Waterways Protection Infrastructure, also known as the Deep Blue Project.
Jamoh the NIMASA DG recently reiterated that assets under the Deep Blue Project will be given necessary attention in order to maintain them to serve their purpose of providing security for Nigerian waters and the entire Gulf of Guinea.
He added that the challenge is not about deploying the assets but about its maintenance and sustaining the tempo of the project so that it can outlive the present generations and continue to be of benefit to future generations. The NIMASA DG thus reiterated the Agency’s commitment to effective management of the assets.
Dr Jamoh noted that the progress made so far is encouraging, adding that intelligence gathering within the maritime domain has reached new heights with recent video evidence of improper ballast water discharge in the nation’s waters.
“This Project as you are aware, is the first of this kind and we are doing so many things for the first time as a civilian Agency of government working with the Armed Forces. Our commitment is unflinching,” Jamoh said.