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Djibouti Appoints New Chair to Port, Freezone Authorities

By admin, on July 12th, 2011

Aboubaker Omar Hadi returns to Djibouti to govern the authorities

In an unexpected move, the government of Djibouti has announced on July 2, 2011, the appointment of a former senior manager of the Port of Djibouti to head both the ports as well as freezones authorities of Djibouti.

Aboubaker Omar Hadi, former commercial director at DP World-Djibouti, and currently general director of a port in Lagos, Nigeria, will soon return to Djibouti as the chief of his county’s strategic assets, replacing Aden Doualeh as chairman. Many here and in Djibouti were surprised to learn this reshuffling at the governing bodies of the maritime agencies because Aboubaker had left Djibouti in August 2008, for West Africa, in what many of his colleagues and associates had said was a loss to his home port.

He was hired by Sifax Group, an international private maritime company jointly owned by Nigerians and Europeans, with its head office in Lagos, and branch offices in Ghana and the United States. Based in the commercial city of Nigeria, Aboubaker, a father of five, has been managing a port and a cargo-handling services company, a subsidiary of the Sifax conglomerate.

He has had 30 years of service at the Port of Djibouti, where he began work in the Marine Department and Port Control, being responsible for port documentation, in 1978. He was then promoted to deputy manager in the statistics department. Later on, he became General Cargo Manager, Container Terminal Manager, and in the past decade a commercial director of the port.

He had won recognition during this period, where he played part in enhancing Ethiopia’s use of the port from 15pc to 90pc.

“I am very pleased to learn that he is back,” said Ambachew Abreha, managing director of the Ethiopian Shipping Lines (ESL), one of the largest customers of the ports in Djibouti. “He is not only a professional person with proven records, but also understands the biggest market for the ports. He is a positive force for the relationship between Ethiopia and Djibouti.”

Born in Dikhil, a town about 100km from the border with Ethiopia, Aboubaker was one of the first port officials to come to Addis Abeba in the early 1990s, in a bid to market his country’s maritime assets as Ethiopia’s “natural outlet to the sea,” a couple of years before the start of the Ethio-Eritrean war. He was credited for playing a major role in the years following Ethiopia’s complete shift to the Port of Djibouti, after 1998.

He was also one of the key figures in Djibouti in the process to develop new oil and container terminals at Douraleh, 13km from the existing port, which consumed half a billion dollars.

Aboubaker received his first degree in ports and multimodal transport from Le Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers, in France, and postgraduate studies in ports and shipping administration from the World Maritime University of Sweden, in 1992, the same school where Ambachew attended seven years earlier.

Aboubaker will soon take the helm at the authorities that are regulating three of Djibouti’s ports and the freezones. The largest port, Douraleh, is now operated by Horizon Djibouti, a joint venture company of DP World (60pc) and the government of Djibouti (40pc).

Unavailable for comment last week, Aboubaker went back to Lagos in order to resign from Sifax, and will return to Djibouti in two weeks, according to close sources.

source: addisfortune.com

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