• It’s time we muscled the will to stop the costly congestion at our ports
The perennial chaos that has come to define maritime activities would again rear its ugly head at the Apapa ports when on April 9 a group of importers and their clearing agents – said to number about a thousand – reportedly besieged the entrance of a shipping company over an alleged refusal to issue them Delivery Notes to enable them move their goods out of the ports.
An industrial action said to have been embarked upon by workers of the shipping company – Mediterranean Shipping Company, Apapa –reportedly crippled the company’s operations as a result of which some 6,000 containers valued at N3 billion were trapped at the Ports and Cargo handling services, Tin Can Port.
Not only are the importers counting their losses in millions –from circumstances that are not their making, they are said to be demanding restitution from the shipping company.
For a sector variously described as ‘gateway’, ‘heartbeat’ of the nation’s economy, it is sadly the way the maritime industry has come to ‘live’ and derive its being. Only in January, Shipping Position, a daily statistics of ship traffic published by Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA), reported 251,860 metric tons (MT) of cargo as stranded at Terminal C and D of the Lagos Ports Complex (LPC), Apapa. The complex is operated by ENL Consortium Limited. As at the time of publication, another 11 vessels said to have arrived December 2014 were reportedly drifting on the seas awaiting berthing space. The official reason given was the yuletide holidays!
As it seems, chaos would appear to be the second nature to an industry which holds so much promise to the nation. Not long ago, operators complained of inadequate facilities to bring operations at par with what obtains in other parts of the world. Privatisation would become the buzz-word as a result. If Nigerians expected that the privatisation of a number of the port operations would attract the much needed injection of capital and technology, it is doubtful that things have changed in any significant sense post-privatisation.
Where they have, their impacts on the overall process have been rather limited. The same would apply to the question of the plethora of agencies operating within the port complexes and the associated bureaucracy and red tape which they gave rise to – of which the industry is ingloriously known. After countless initiatives – including serial presidential task forces – we must say that the results have been a mixed bag.
We must hasten to make the point that the problems in the sector are not necessarily intractable – nor are they rocket science – in the sense that they are sometimes made out to be. True, a number of the problems have to do with capacity issues bordering on poor attention to details of documentation; majority however stem from lapses in regulations, of enforcement of standards and the lack of will by the industry regulator – the Nigerian Shippers Council – to penalise errant operators.
Here, the council would seem to have had its work cut out: ensure that individual operators are treated equitably and that a powerful player is not allowed to trample on the rights of the small player.
Beyond those, it seems to us that the incoming Buhari administration would require a fresh and holistic approach to the multifarious problems of the maritime sector. We refer specifically to the problems of congestion, corruption and the prohibitive charges as indeed other problems that have consigned the nation’s ports to the ranks of the least competitive among its peers. It is the least the administration could do at this time of dwindling oil revenues.
‘True, a number of the problems have to do with capacity issues bordering on poor attention to details of documentation; majority however stem from lapses in regulations, of enforcement of standards and the lack of will by the industry regulator – the Nigerian Shippers Council – to penalise errant operators’