In the light of the seeming endless road traffic in Lagos, Dorcas Egede, in this piece catalogues the experiences and thoughts of Lagos commuters, who have embraced the waterways option and the contending issues, as recounted by the boat operators.
Ever imagined a Lagos without traffic? For many, this would be mere wishful thinking; and you can’t really blame them. If you have ever been so unlucky as to spend up to eight hours- to and from work, in the notorious Lagos traffic, then you’re always going to sneer at anyone who as much as bandies any such Utopian idea of a possible Lagos without traffic.
In fact, the Lagos State government, tenure after tenure, has worked in vain towards ensuring that commuting becomes easier for Lagosians. This desire, most certainly birthed the BRT bus idea and its dedicated lanes. While this seemed effective at the beginning in moving people to their destinations in doubly quick time, one can see that these buses now get caught up in the Lagos mad traffic, especially on roads where the government has been unable to carve out dedicated lanes for the scheme; or where the usually unruly drivers decide to throw caution to the wind and ply the routes at peak hours.
Therefore, the challenge of decongesting the perennial Lagos traffic remains a knotty one. In fact there doesn’t seem to be a solution in sight, maybe an amelioration; except of course if the government and indeed the people consider and embrace other means of transportation. Here, water or marine transportation comes to mind.
However, in the wake of the recent boat mishaps in Ijede and some other riverine areas of Lagos earlier this year, there have been growing concerns about what efforts the government is putting in place to make the waterways safe enough for those who may be considering it as an option. Without doubt, it seems quite a faster and more convenient alternative, safe for the phobia, sometimes justifiably so, that has been built around it over-time.
A faster and more convenient alternative
Segun Faleyimu, who works on Lagos Island and travels by water to work, told The Nation that water transportation is much easier and safer, provided the safety regulations are strictly adhered to. Compared to the stress of commuting from Ikorodu to the Island by road, along with the horrendous hours spent on the road for a journey that really shouldn’t take more than half an hour or thereabout, he said water transportation is by far better. But then, the ferry or boat fares are really high at the moment, he complained. He believes that if the government can step in, they will be able to help subsidise the rate or come in with more affordable options that would be within the reach of the average commuter.
“The long queue you saw at Ikorodu garage for instance, are people waiting to board BRT buses because they are cheaper, and that is because they cannot afford the water transport rate. Even those of us who still do, it’s because we have to get to work in good time, by all means. On Friday, for instance, I decided to go by road; I got to the garage at 8:00 am. Do you know that I didn’t get to the Island until 12:00 noon?”
Another passenger, Matti Oluwajomiloju, waiting to be ferried off to work, told The Nation that she had been traversing on the Lagos lagoon for 3years. She has no fear whatsoever for water and she said she is very comfortable with the service she gets from the ferry operator she patronises, she however believes that they could do better with more ferries, so as to reduce the amount of time they spend waiting to board a ferry. The ride, according to her takes about 30-40 minutes. She prefers to go to work via this means because the stress is less and much more time is saved compared to going by road. Even though it seems quite expensive, she doesn’t exactly mind the cost, as long as she can save energy and time.
Adenubi Omolaja, another regular water commuter expressed confidence in water transportation. He said the only boat mishap he ever witnessed happened 2 years ago between Baiyeku and Badore. Other than that, he has never experienced one and prays never to. He strongly believes that if government puts her full weight behind water transportation in the state, it will not only help in the reduction of transportation cost, it will also help to drastically reduce the traffic on the roads, as well as make the waterways safer for boat operators and the people who make use of the option.
Sighting Ganiyu Adewale fully kitted with his personal life jacket, brings to mind the memory of those days when the Lagos State government tried in vain to enforce the use of helmets on commercial motorcycles, otherwise known as okadas. Back then many people were forced to own personal helmets for health reasons. Ganiyu told this reporter that he uses his own life jacket for his personal safety and hygiene. He seemed to be the one passenger who had been using water transportation longest. He said he had been going to work by ferry for over 5 years.
In his words, “Water transportation is very conducive, fast, reliable and even far more secure than road transportation.” He too believes that if government can invest more in water transportation in the state, the traffic on our roads will drastically reduce and life would be much easier for Lagosians.
Abimbola Durojaiye, who apparently relishes the thrill of travelling on water, as well as the time and energy it helps to save, said going to work by road is a recipe for frustration. She believes that it is pointless going to work after one must have spent the reproductive hours of the day in traffic. As soon as she discovered the water route to the Island from her Ikorodu base two years ago, she abandoned the traffic-congested roads and embraced water transportation. Now, it takes her 25 minutes to get to her office from the jetty. She is however of the opinion that the cost is high. “It means parting with over N1,000 per day. If you’re a low income earner, earning the minimum wage of N18,000, using this means of transportation is a lot of trouble.”
Durojaiye thus wants the government to take water transportation more seriously. She said the jetty the last administration built is yet to be commissioned and has been lying fallow for more than four years. She believes that if government steps into the scene, it will be able to subsidise the rate of water transportation and make things easier for Lagosians.
Fraught with many challenges
Bolaji Alaka, General Manager, Sea Coach Boat Company Limited, one of the ferry operators spoke to The Nation about the challenges of water transportation. He said his organisation has been in the business for nearly a year. The challenges range from issues with wrecks, logs of woods, presence of fishermen and several others. He described wrecks as abandoned and damaged vessels or boats that sunk into the water. According to him, if these wrecks are not cleared out of the water, they can cause damage to the boat or even make it capsize. “If the tide (water level) is low, it can be sighted by oncoming boat captains, but if the tide is high, nobody will assume that there’s such wreck underneath the water. And once a boat runs into it, there’ll be problems.”
He also said that wrecks are left on the water by timber merchants who transport logs of wood and planks to Lagos from neighbouring states. Sometimes, due to the distance they have to travel, some of the woods they are transporting fall into the water and they just continue on their journey, not bothering to pick them up. These wrecks on the water, Alaka said are responsible for many boat mishaps, because if these locally made boats run into these wrecks, depending on the level of impact, they may develop mechanical faults, and if the impact is more, they may capsize. “One of our boats collided with a timber log Thursday last week, and as a result the transom fell off. Now, we cannot use it until that problem is fixed.”
Sherrif Olarenwaju, a Jetty Officer of Metro Ferry Services Limited, also added his voice to Alaka’s submission, saying dredging activities indeed lead to wrecks on the water. They said some of the materials used in dredging are sometimes lost in the water, and in turn become potential danger to boats.
Olanrewaju also talked about the activities of fishermen as a major challenge. “As for the fishermen, they set their net mostly at night. Now, if a captain does not sight the net on time, the moment the boat runs into it, and the propeller gets hooked by the net, the boat immediately stops moving. Usually, it takes up to 2 or 3 minutes to have the net removed; and that is if there is a knife on board. Meanwhile there are people who are not familiar with water transportation, so the moment the boat stops in the middle of the water, more than two hundred thoughts would run through their minds. That’s why we try as much as possible to avoid a situation where boats stop in the middle of the water.”
Water hyacinths, which appear on the waters between October and January, Olanrewaju says, can also be a clog in the wheel of boats. “So we try to create a pathway for our boats to ply and create a barrier for the hyacinths to be on one path and our boats on another.” Sherrif said.
Alaka also listed the lack of security officers and the absence of marine ambulances on the waters as other troubling challengers bedevilling their work. He noted if there had been security officers on the waterways, the recent Ikorodu bank robbers would not have had the effrontery to escape on boat.
Expressing concern about the recent boat mishaps (while stressing that their own boats and ferries have never been involved in any), Alaka noted that if marine paramedics had been on hand around the jetties, some of the passengers would have been rescued.
Asked if the life jackets are not to ensure the safety of passengers, Alaka said life jackets are built to prevent passengers from drowning in case a boat capsizes. It cannot prevent people from getting injured should the boat collide with any dangerous material on the water. Marine paramedics should be readily available to at least administer first aid treatment to passengers, should there be any boat mishap.
Another challenge, he said, borders on the incessant fuel scarcity, which the operators said is biting hard on their work.
Head above water in spite of challenges
Despite the challenges bedevilling water transportation, operators say they have been able to keep their heads above water level. “With the presence of other licensed jetties around us, we now ferry an average of 1,200 passengers on days when fewer people go across, and up to 1,500 on days when we have more people commuting by ferry from Ikorodu to the Island and back,” said Sherrif.
Alaka on the other hand said: “Depending on the patronage, we ferry about a thousand passengers daily. And we do not only ply Ikorodu-CMS axis, we ply CMS-Apapa, Ikorodu-Victoria Island…. We have jetties at CMS, Ikorodu, Apapa, VI, and Leventis. But the one at Leventis is not yet operational. We are still awaiting some approval from the regulatory bodies before we begin operation.”
Car Park services
Interestingly, the boat operators also generate income from their car parks, which they both say takes over a hundred cars. The Metro Jetty, which obviously has a bigger car park accommodates up to 150 cars daily. They have a common fee of N100 per car. This fee however seems to be the only common ground the two operators share, as their boat fares vary. While the Metro ferry, which has been in business for a longer time charges N500 per trip, the Sea Coach ferry charges N700. Both also claim that even with the fare they charge, they are just managing to keep the business afloat.
The Metro ferry operators told The Nation that they had to switch from the use of ferries, which were foreign to the use of locally made speed boats in order to meet the demands of their customers who expressed the need to get to work faster. Again, to meet the need of their many customers and create opportunities for young men who own boats, this operator registers some private boat owners under their operations. “We also offer boat chatter services to those who want to go on a boat ride, say from Ikorodu to Ibeshe in Badagry.”
Safety measures
Alaka, who prides in their boats and ferries as being foreign built specially to serve our waters, and equipped with modern devices like the Global Positioning System (GPS) and a magnetic compass, told The Nation that with these devices, the captain can never miss his way, even if the weather is foggy, as long as he maintains the numbers on the compass. The GPS, he said, tells the captain his exact position at every point.
In addition to the magnetic compass and GPS on the dash board of their boats, Alaka said, “On each boat, we have the captain and two sailors on deck. The work of one of the sailors is to stand in front of the boat, he is called the lookout. He looks out for the captain to see what is happening afar off and directs the captain, whether to go to the right or to the left, in order to avoid collision with any object. The other sailor mans the engine behind the boat. The engine has a sound it must maintain from one point to another point. Once that sound changes, he must notify the captain.”
The Metro ferry operators use locally built speed boats that are built in such a way that the captain is his own lookout. So, their boats have only one deck hand who mans the engine to ensure it’s running just fine. Sherrif said, “We start ferrying at 6:00/6:10 if the weather is clear, but if it’s foggy, we start ferrying at 6:30. We can’t ferry earlier because visibility will be too poor. What we always consider here is safety firstly; and to God be the glory, since we started operations nearly 8 years ago, we have never recorded any boat mishap.” Continuing on other safety measures they have put in place, he said, “When we ferry pregnant women, we ensure they sit at the back of the boat. This is because the impact of the boat hitting against the waves is felt more at the front than at the back.”
Sherrif reiterated that water transportation is the fastest and safest means of transportation, as long as operators keep to safety rules. One basic safety rule both operators judiciously adhere to is ensuring that every passenger puts on a life jacket before boarding.
They both revealed that the weekends are spent maintaining the boat.
Lots of business opportunities
An appreciable number of young men who live in the area have also found opportunities to earn honest income, courtesy the ferry and boat services. Just beside the car park of both jetties, is an alternative car park; even corners of the street are used as car parks, where these young men accommodate vehicles, especially when there are no more spaces in the car parks provided by the various boat operators. They also offer car wash services for amounts between N300 and N500.
Call for more government involvement
From the ferry operators to the passengers, everyone seems to be calling on the government to pay more attention to water transportation in the state, as they believe that it will help to decongest the traffics on the roads and make water transportation cheaper and safer, such that more people will begin to patronise. Alaka believes that if the marine regulatory bodies such as the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) and Lagos State Water Authority (LASWA) can come together, making water transportation a viable means of transportation will not be much of an uphill task.
Alaka also said, “There can never be traffic on the water. It’s big enough to contain as many boats as possible. The only problem with having too many operators is that the more operators we have, the more difficult it will be for the operating bodies to have a grasp on our activities.”
Speaking with The Nation, Mu’azu Sambo, the Lagos Area Manager of the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) said the agency is doing everything possible to revamp water transportation across the nation, as it is known that of the four means of transportation (road, rail, air and water), water is the most dormant.
According to figures made available by the agency, there are currently 136 registered commercial boat operators. One can easily tell that Sambo doesn’t reckon with the majority of the boats used in ferrying passengers, when he calls them “Flying Coffins.”
Asked what the flying coffins are still doing on our waterways considering the grave dangers they pose to passengers, he revealed that NIWA together with Lagos State Waterways Authority (LASWA) have come up with regulations, which they would enforce on the operators. He believes that with these regulations in place, our waterways would be rid of the “flying coffins.”
Part of these regulations is that, ‘Every boat must have two engines. The flying boats don’t have these, so with the regulation enforced, operators who still use these boats will be forced out of the business.
Secondly every boat must be able to ferry up to 30 passengers. The flying boats don’t have the capacity to take up to 30 people.
Also, boats used in ferrying passengers must have a Global Positioning System (GPS) a compass, and four doors.
About operators being forced to jerk up the fare, Sambo reckoned that nothing is free, even in Freetown, adding that if we must get something up to standard, then we cannot shy away from cost. But he quickly added that the agency will see how to step in so that passengers are not brought down under the weight of the fare, whilst ensuring that operators are not running at a loss.
Asked about the challenges operators face on the waters, Sambo ruled out the challenge posed by dredging and fishing activities, while he consented to the fact that our waters are really dirty. He said the agency is aware of this and they are seriously working to rid the waters of wrecks.
