The economy of seafaring is very good, but most people in Ghana do not know about it – Captain Amanhyia

Branch Secretary of the Nautical Institute, William Amanhyia in an interview with Business and Financial Times stated, the country’s industrialization and infrastructure improvement plan requires the obtaining of a vessel that will assist it with assembling the vital materials required not exclusively to encourage financial development yet additionally make Ghana a maritime hub on the continent.

Recognizing the tremendous amount of capital required to embark on such an endeavor, he noted that with the facilitating of the secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), development of railway infrastructure, Ghana, presently like never before, necessities to marshal assets or team up with the private sector to secure a vessel for national purposes. “It is expensive but we can do it” he said.

Capt. Amanhyia believes AfCFTA is great news for the maritime sector, and the nation must do everything in its power to boost fortunes of the maritime sector by being the first African country to acquire a vessel solely for training and trade purposes.

According to him, government has a big vision, for example, with the railway project; we can buy a ship to commute all the materials for our infrastructure and industrialization initiatives. Now we have the AfCFTA, and that comes with some great opportunities for the continent.

“African nations do not understand that seafaring skills have become a strategic asset. Most companies globally want to employ from Africa because the Europeans do not want to go to sea again. Nobody wants to go and spend three months outside living without his family, but we are very lucky that in Africa our family system is okay with it. This is the time we need to take advantage and get the best benefit out of it. We have been talking to governments all over Africa, but they seem not to care,” he lamented.

He added that the move can help give meaningful remuneration to many Ghanaians since the sector is supervised and regulated by international standards – with the well-being and safety of seafarers being paramount.

“The economy of seafaring is very good, but most people in Ghana do not know about it. That is one of the things we want to change. First of all, seafarers need a training ship. If the Ghana seafaring community gets a training ship, particularly for the Regional Maritime University, unemployment will reduce drastically.

“The maritime industry can employ 500-1,000 people every year, but we need to train them. The problem is that nobody wants to train the seafarers, they want people who are already cooked; training the seafarers is very expensive, and that is why the government needs to take the initiative. The only thing they can do is that they should be able to buy a training ship for us,” Captain Amanhyia said.

He added that no African country owns a training ship but America has just bought five brand-new ones for the nation with each of them having the capability of taking 600 people. When we multiply that by five and we realize that they are able to churn out about 3,000 seafarers every year; we can adopt the idea and do something like this as well, and we need the Ghana Maritime Authority to champion this agenda.

Meanwhile, B&FT gathered that the Ghana Navy has begun the process to build some ships locally – but not to the scale for international trade.

Source: BFT