Progress made towards Ghana’s cabotage aspirations

The Deputy Director in charge of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation at the Ghana Maritime Authority, Dr. Richard Lartey, has revealed that some significant progress has been made in the country’s bid to implement the Cabotage law that was passed last year.

The Cabotage Law is designed to restrict a significant part of the maritime trade in Ghanaian waters to Ghanaians. The Law will ensure that 50% of all officers and 75% of all ratings operating in Ghanaian waters are Ghanaians.

“So far we have documented procedures to inform stakeholders about the detailed permutation processes we have also sent some of our staff to Nigeria to study the permutation should I say lesson learned or challenges learned by the Nigerian Maritime Administration and safety agencies to see some of the challenges they encountered when they started the implementation. NIMASA started rolling out the cabotage in 2003 so in Africa they are the leading agency in terms of cabotage”.

Speaking on the side-lines of the Blue Economy Conference, he explained further the benefits of the Cabotage regime to Ghanaians.

“Cabotage means that we are restricting maritime trade to our locals so you can have a situation where the foreign cargo vessels are coming in but they have to register under the cabotage regime. It means that our graduates from the Maritime University will have the opportunity to work on board the vessels.”
The official of the Ghana Maritime Authority also touched on the Go-to-Sea program that will be launched soon.

“This is a program that we are launching out very soon to educate and sensitise SHS students and other accredited tertiary institution on the need to see the seafarer career as a very good profession and so we will be going to a lot of school, institutions to educate them on the prospects of the maritime industry,” he said.