If care is not taken, 100 years from now, our great grand pikins & pikinses will still be importing sardines from Morocco as we have been doing for decades now. What is wrong with us that we cannot package ordinary fish add vegetable oil & salt and sell to other nations across the globe? Because that is all that is inside a tin of sardines, just those three ingredients & many Nigerians cannot do without it in a day.
Are you aware that people from other countries carry massive fishing trawlers & steal fish from Nigerian waters on a daily basis and go sell in their own nations thus making us lose billions of dollars in revenue & job creation?
The protection of Nigerian waters & all the natural resources that are within it, like the fish & mineral resources is the job of the Nigerian Navy but the navy is just a fanciful toothless bulldog where admirals only wear shiny uniforms & fight to take over naval commands where oil bunkering is highest while their illiterate ratings take delight in harassing civilian drivers on the roads. The navy is not doing shit. They can keep deceiving the nation using media hype but those who know how deep the rot is know that it is so bad that even the officers of the Nigerian Navy cannot swim & many of them deliberately allow criminality to fester on Nigerian waters because their are incapacitated & also gain from the corruption.
Meanwhile, Morocco, where we get all the sardines we take with bread & tea is a north African Sunni Muslim kingdom of 33 million people ruled by a 51-year-old king, and it is one of the most developed nations in Africa with really impressive standards of living although they don’t have oil and fish is one of their most important exports. In fact, Morocco is the largest fish market in all of Africa with fishing making up 56% of its agricultural exports and 16% of its total exports and 3% of their GDP so you can appreciate how dependent they are on you to keep buying those tins of sardines.
Morocco has signed a new deal with the European Union which allows them to permit European foreign fishing vessels to also fish from its very rich western coast waters and pay annual fees to Morocco thus opening another line of revenue to the Moroccans, the National Fishery Office of Morocco is responsible for overseeing this, do you know the equivalent office in your country? ( Though we don’t really need EU deal but regional deal first) Anyone with a fishing barge or vessel can enter Nigerian waters & fish, nobody will arrest you & even when they do, just bribe the navy and that’s it, so we end up losing so much while unemployment keeps spiralling out of control. China, Peru, Japan, USA, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, India, Thailand, Norway and Iceland are dependent on fish exports to strengthen their economies and will invade your country if you fish illegally in their waters. For these sane nations, fish = crude oil.
I am stressing this because fishing in general and aquaculture in general is so underdeveloped in Nigeria that we have forgotten that some of the most powerful nations in the world depend on fish exports, some even look down on the industry. Our own waters and its vast wealth of fish, mollusks, crustaceans, aquatic plants (seaweeds) and marine organisms are poorly-patrolled, not organized & we are losing a lot via this means. Although our president is the son of a fisherman schooled, fed and raised with the money made from fishing and he even has a degree in fisheries and hydrobiology, he does not seem to give a damn about this very lucrative industry. Well, he did not do anything for the zoologists too so why should the fishermen complain? Abeg, make I chop my sardine o jare. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Just this last year, Morocco made almost $1.6 billion (15 billion dirhams) just from the export of fish and as I am writing this to you, their fishing industry alone has created 170,000 direct job positions and 500,000 indirect jobs. They are now the largest producer of seafood in Africa and the 25th in the world. We that we have more fish, where are we? We are still importing while some will enter our waters, steal our fish & then export it back to us. Our president is the best. He has created one trillion jobs for the youths in the fishing industry.
Abiyamo
