Director General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dakuku Peterside has highlighted his management’s determination to make the agency a world class, high performance organisation.

Peterside who said this during the Management Performance Review (MPR) of the agency held in Lagos said that the repositioning initiative is all-encompassing and when concluded, would be beneficial to the entire maritime sector.

The NIMASA DG also said that the MPR was an avenue to assess the progress being made by the agency viz-a-viz its reform, restructuring and repositioning drive to ensure that its mandate is achieved.

According to the DG, “There is no organisation that can grow without innovation and the MPR affords us a rare opportunity to assess our journey thus far. It is a rare privilege to match set goals with results…to assess ourselves on how far we have gone in this journey.

“When I joined you in NIMASA, we sat down and agreed to build a world class high performance organisation. In subscribing to that, we set out to craft a medium term strategic plan which would be our roadmap.

“We have already started the critical elements of the things we agreed that are necessary to build a world class maritime organisation. One is the automation of our processes and to fast track this, we set up a special task force. It is our vision that by October, NIMASA would be fully automated.”

The NIMASA boss noted that the dream of the agency is to be recognised as the foremost maritime regulatory agency in Africa.

Peterside who said that the agency has the duty to facilitate maritime business and not to stifle it, also assured stakeholders that NIMASA will create an enabling environment that would satisfy the yearnings of all.

“The bigger picture is to build a world class, high performance organisation that would satisfy the interest and yearnings of our clients as well as serve the interest of the country that set us up. We are indeed facilitators of maritime business, therefore we will not stifle it,” he added.

The MPR session which is still ongoing is expected to review the achievements of the agency’s targets for the half year ended June 30, 2016 and map out strategies for meeting the set targets as outlined in its work plan for the period in review.