Murtala Muhammed Domestic Airport (MMA2), Lagos
DESPITE reforms that have cost taxpayers so much money, many things are still horribly wrong with port operations in Nigeria. Instead of improving, the situation has become so critical that early this month, the United States Coast Guard, through the US Consulate in Lagos, issued a 90-day ultimatum, warning “the Federal Government to improve on its ports security system or face the stoppage of sail of vessels to Nigeria.” The US body threatened to mobilise its international partners to boycott Nigerian ports if the situation did not change. This is a self-inflicted indictment of recent federal administrations, especially under the incumbent Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the National Assembly committees on Marine Transport, which have oversight functions on the ports.
Top officials of the Nigeria Ports Authority and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, the body that manages security at the nation’s six port complexes in Lagos, Warri, Port Harcourt, Onne and Calabar, also share a hefty part of the blame for the decay, since they are negligent in their duties. Although Sambo Dasuki, the National Security Adviser, has waded into the issue by giving NIMASA 45 days “to tighten its security network within and around the nation’s seaports,” the measure is too little to address the massive security breach at the nation’s gateways to international trade. The NSA must do more than this tokenism.
The US Coast Guard audit report about the ports, though disconcerting, is not entirely surprising. The report said that Nigerian ports, particularly the Tin Can Island Port, had a poor security system, which made them seem “like a regular market place where all kinds of people have unrestricted access, while broken down vehicles litter the ports’ access roads.” There is no denying the report as the average seaport user in Nigeria is accustomed to the feeble enforcement of security rules in and around the ports. Many people who have no business at the ports, notably thieves, touts and layabouts, who, in local parlance, are referred to as “wharf rats,” have found a home there, an abnormality successive NPA and NIMASA managements have been indifferent to. These touts go about stealing and vandalising imported goods, while also posing a danger to human life. This distressing situation has to be addressed once and for all.
Two years on, hindsight shows that the Goodluck Jonathan Administration’s promise to fix the ports when it came to power in 2011, an effort coordinated by Okonjo-Iweala, was mere posturing. Although it made all the right noises then, the inability of the Presidential Ports Reform Committee headed by the minister to diligently carry out its assignment is returning to haunt the nation. The committee had expelled eight of 15 security and regulatory agencies from the ports in October 2011 in an attempted reorganisation. The measure worked for about three months, but broke down thereafter because of lack of the will to implement policies.
As Patrick Akpobolokemi, the Director-General of NIMASA, rightly noted, the US issued the ultimatum to shut Nigeria out of the international shipping trade partly because of Nigeria’s inexplicable failure to implement the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code, which is aimed at sensing and managing security threats at ports worldwide. But Akpobolokemi has to do more than talking to fix the security concerns threatening the economy. In actual fact, the situation degenerated to this sorry pass because of recent altercation between NIMASA and the Presidential Implementation Committee on Maritime Security and Safety. As the two bodies struggled to control the revenue channels, security worsened and touts returned to take over the landscape.
The rot at the ports is also exemplified by the inability of the Federal Government to reconstruct the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, which has fallen into disrepair, causing untold traffic hardship to Lagos road users, especially the articulated vehicle drivers. Although the Lagos State Government has made representations to the Federal Government about the dire state of the road, which leads to the ports where the central government is raking in more than N2 trillion in income yearly, the Federal Government has failed to do the right thing. As a result, many unnecessary accidents occur on the route, while undue delays cost the economy huge man-hour losses.
Seaports are critical to the Nigerian economy and national security. Experts and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development say that “maritime transport is the backbone of international trade and a key engine driving globalisation.” For example, Africa’s merchandise exports rose from $100 billion in 1995 to $560 billion in 2010. To show that it has a good grasp of what the ports in Nigeria represent to the country’s fortune and that it is serious about fixing the economy, the Federal Government has to identify and punish those who brought this particular international embarrassment on the country.
Experts say that every seaport requires deep-water access, sufficient land for staging and storage, and unrestricted access to highway, rail, inland waterways, and pipeline networks. Fixing the ports will not only increase revenue generation, it will attract goodwill to the ports as all the goods currently being diverted to neighbouring ports in Cotonou (Benin Republic) and Takoradi (Ghana) will return. As a first step, the security agencies must flush out all the criminals that have given Nigeria a bad name from the ports, while a decongestion programme that will end the punitive cargo down time and reduce demurrage should be promptly instituted.
No comments:
Post a Comment