We Consistently Promote Staff During My Tenure-Dakuku Peterside

Dr. Dakuku Peterside, the former DG, NIMASA and a former legislator shares his experience and his shared relationship with his staff while he was the DG of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency.

Dakuku in his words on Sunday the 21^st of June, 2020 in an interview said we literally impacted in all area of human capacity, so when I look back, I look back with some sense of fulfillment, I believe that we did our best for the staff of the agency and that’s why I can walk with My head high and the result is that they gave us maximum corporation and we were able to achieve most if not all of our big programmes.

Though Dakaku when asked how the relationship between him and his staff as he said his staff are in a better position to talk about our relationship, but humanly speaking from My own perspective, I believe I left when the ovation was loudest.

Meanwhile, Dakuku further said: “I still enjoy a cordial relationship with the staff of the agency. Like the gentleman that I am, I believe that the right thing to do is to stay away from the agency for the new sheriffs in the block to bring their own style of leadership to cast their own vision to follow their own mission to achieve their goal. And when You leave the agency, You truly leave and just wish the agency well and support the agency.”

When we got to the agency one of the earliest thing we did was to do a diagnostic review of the state of things, we were lucky there was a study was done by PWC, then, of course, we also got a detailed master plan done by the previous administration.

“There is a plan done by Arch. Agwu’s administration and there was another plan that was made by the Temi Omaseyi’s administration.

So, I had the privilege of studying those documents, then we had a brainstorming section with staff, after 3 days of brainstorming section with the staffs, we were able to come up with a road map and every single thing we did in the 4yrs of our stay in the agency was based on that roadmap which we agreed with the staff.

“And one of the highlights of the roadmap was to reset our human capacity.

And what did we do in resetting our human capacity?

We did at least 5 critical things:

·         We consistently promoted staff, because there was backlogs of promotion throughput that period, so we consistently promoted staff throughout the 4yrs.

·         We realized that housing was an issue we revisited housing loan scheme, increased and doubled the number of persons who benefited from the housing loan scheme.

·         The homeownership grants, before then it has always been in the books nobody had implemented it, I was the first person to implement the homeownership grant.

·         We doubled the numbers of persons we send for training abroad and those we send for training locally.

Aside from doubling the number of persons we send for training.

·         We increased the employers’ contribution to the pension scheme from 10% to 20% meaning that NIMASA staff, when they retire they get more benefit in the area of pension that again we also did. Dakuku added.

Ayooluwa Joshua