Weeks after the Federal Government, through the Ministry of Transportation, charged its committee to ensure the disbursement of the $350m Cabotage Vessels Financing Fund, experts and groups have knocked the government over the failure to disburse the fund.
The experts, who spoke exclusively to our correspondent on Monday in Lagos, said that till this moment, they were yet to hear from the committee regarding fund disbursement as promised by the Federal Government.
The PUNCH gathered that a high-powered committee of eminent Nigerians has been constituted by the Ministry to work out the modality for the disbursement of the fund.
Reacting to this, the President of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, Chris Ebare, said the issue of the disbursement of the fund had been a recurring thing for some time now.
“It has been a recurring thing. We have been hearing it since the past administration, so we don’t really know who is fooling who. We expected that all hands should be on deck and the disbursement of the $350m CVFF should be made in such a way that all the specialists should be involved in the committee. We are the chartered ship brokers.
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“There is nothing you talk about in the maritime industry that we are not unaware of. We are the first people they ought to contact because we are the specialists.
If they want to buy a vessel, we are the people who are supposed to know about it and get the specifications. We have been reading it on the newspaper and as far as we are concerned, it is just on the pages of the newspaper.
We should learn to borrow leaf from other maritime nations.”
A source, who didn’t want his name on print, said: “The minister assured us that they are going to see the committee. It is three weeks now and we have not heard anything. It wasn’t nice for us to begin to pressurise the minister because it was out of his freewill that he called us to come from Lagos to Abuja.
We don’t have to talk about this until we know the direction he is going. I don’t want to make speculation that there won’t be a disbursement of the CVFF till the end of this month. Let me see his moves first. The problem is, how does he disburse it?”
