The President of the National Council of Managing Directors of Licensed Customs Agents (NCMDLCA), Lucky Awimero, has warned that Nigeria’s maritime future is at risk unless the country urgently addresses its knowledge and skills gap through sustained investment in training.
Awimero said Nigeria could not build a competitive and future-ready maritime industry without fundamentally overhauling its training system and making continuous capacity development a priority.
He spoke as Chairman of the Occasion at the 2026 Maritime Training Summit and Awards organised by the Association of Maritime Journalists of Nigeria (AMJON) in Lagos.
The summit was themed: ‘The Power of Innovation in a Future-Ready Maritime Training Agenda.’
Awimero attributed some of Nigeria’s persistent development challenges to the failure to adequately train and equip its people, stressing that knowledge and human capacity were essential to national development.
According to him, training should not be limited to the acquisition of technical skills but must provide people with the capacity, information and knowledge required to drive meaningful development.
‘Nigeria don’t train,’ he said, calling for a fundamental rethink of the country’s approach to human capital development.
He urged Nigeria to ‘redesign our steps, redirect our focus and drive to have knowledge,’ noting that countries that had achieved significant economic and technological progress did so through deliberate investments in knowledge and human capacity.
Awimero called on stakeholders to move away from outdated training approaches and adopt a knowledge-driven system capable of preparing young Nigerians for the demands of a rapidly changing global economy.
He said Nigeria must change its concept of development by making training and knowledge acquisition central to its national development strategy.
‘Our children must not live the kind of life that we are living, except Nigeria will collapse,’ he warned.
The NCMDLCA president also commended AMJON for placing maritime training and innovation at the centre of industry discourse, describing the initiative as a bold step towards addressing the sector’s human capacity challenges.
He said continuous training was critical to the development of the maritime industry because of the constant changes in technology, regulations and global operating standards.
Awimero’s warning comes amid growing concerns over the maritime skills gap and the need to equip professionals and young entrants into the sector with the knowledge and competencies required to compete in an increasingly technology-driven global maritime industry.
He maintained that without deliberate investment in continuous learning and capacity building, Nigeria risked falling further behind countries that had made knowledge and innovation the foundation of their development.
The AMJON summit brought together maritime stakeholders, policymakers, regulators, industry professionals and journalists to examine how innovation and modern training approaches could strengthen Nigeria’s maritime workforce and position the sector for sustainable growth.