Posted on March 27, 2019
The Nigerian Shippers’ Council has said that the 80 per cent of cargoes destined for West and Central Africa are discharged at Nigerian seaports because the ports are now efficient and effective.
Executive secretary of the Council, Barr. Hassan Bello, disclosed this in an exclusive interview with LEADERSHIP recently. According to him, the Ghana and Togo ports are not a threat to Nigerian seaports because of the efficiency of the nation’s seaports.
LEADERSHIP recalls that there were reports recently that Lomé port, Togo, has becomeWest Africa’s leading container port, snatching the position from Lagos ports in Nigeria in the last quarter of 2018 while APM Terminal said its $1billion investment at Tema port still on schedule and when completed, will handle 3.5 million TEUs in annual throughput capacity.
According to Netherlands leading consulting firm, Dynamar, the Port of Lomé (PAL) in Togo has rapidly expanded from 311,500 twenty-foot equivalent (TEU) containers in 2013 to 1,193,800 TEU in 2017.
But, the NCS’s boss believed that despite the feat achieved by the Ghana and Lome ports, Nigeria seaport still remained preferred destination for cargoes in the sub-region.
He said: “Out of the cargoes that are meant for the West and Central Africa coming from around the world, 80 percent of the cargoes comes to Nigeria while other countries share the remaining 20percent and distributed among themselves. So, how can they be a hub? Also, Nigerian ports are becoming efficient by the day and we are attracting cargoes from other neighboring ports. The moment we get our infrastructure right and get our connectivity right and tackle insecurity on the waterways, then that’s where we see the real hub.”
Bello also stated that the actualisation of the Lekki deep seaport project would further consolidate the hub status. ‘‘We have the Lekki deep seaports with its huge capacity and when the Lekki port is completed and came fully on board, we will get bigger ships and send the smaller ones to other countries,’’ he said.
Also speaking on the National Transport Commission (NTC) Bill, Bello assured that the bill would be assented to by President Muhammadu Buhari before the end of the current administration.
He said: “The rejection of the bill is a misconception and I would love many of your colleagues to do more research on the issue. The Ministry of Transportation called the meeting of all heads of agencies to discuss the NTC bill. The meeting was held about three months ago and we made observations because the bill was no longer under us, it was going through legislative process and the legislators have their faculties and their consultants. But when we saw the bill, there were some certain things that had to be removed so the minister wrote to the President that the bill is good to be signed except for only three areas of observations noted.
“So, the President wrote to the Senate that the observations be removed and they have done so. It is now a clean bill but because of the election, it is delayed. So both the Senate and House of Assembly have finished with the bill but then there is administrative machinery in the National Assembly. They are looking at it so they could pass it again to the President. So that is what we are waiting for.”
Source: leadership.ng
