Realising the imperative of urgent diversification of the country’s economy to substantially reduce its dependence on crude oil exports for foreign exchange earnings, drastically limit imports, especially of non-essential commodities, and enhance economic self-reliance, the President Muhammadu Buhari administration has commendably adopted policies designed to boost non-oil exports, with particular emphasis on agriculture. Consequently, there has been an improvement in the domestic production of products like rice, yams, soya beans, sesame seeds, as well as cashew nuts in shell and flour.
Yet, the continued parlous state of critical infrastructure across the country constitutes a serious threat to the realisation of the government’s objectives in this regard.
The virtual state of emergency that obtains in Apapa, Lagos, one of the country’s major economic nerve centres, as a result of protracted traffic gridlock offers the most vivid and disturbing mirror of this grave challenge. According to reports, the Tin Can Island Port II, Apapa, one of the largest dry port facilities in the country which handles close to 80 per cent of imports and exports, has practically been on lockdown as the bad roads and traffic gridlock have impeded smooth access to the port by importers and exporters. As a result, the country has not recorded any exports through this facility in the first two months of 2018.
Mr. Sadiq Farouk, Public Relations Manager of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) Area Command in charge of the terminal confirmed to the media that no revenue from export of Nigerian products had been generated by the service between January and the first week of March this year. This certainly is bad news for an economy that needs all the revenue it can generate to consolidate its still fragile recovery from recession and stimulate further growth.
It is thus not surprising that the sharp drop by 51% in Nigeria’s non-oil exports witnessed in the second half of 2017 has deteriorated further in the first quarter of this year. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has reported that the value of agricultural exports so far this quarter is 38.43 percent lower than the second quarter of 2017.
One serious consequence of this situation is the steep rise in the cost of doing business at the ports. Since trucks have to queue for close to two months before being able to reach the port terminals to drop cargoes or offload containers due to the bad and clogged roads, truck owners are said to have hiked their charges by 230 percent; thus charging N200, 000 per container compared to the former cost of N60,000. Matters are worsened by the absence of storage facilities for perishable agricultural products like yams, which decay rapidly under sustained heat.
Business mogul, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, had last month drawn attention to the huge drain that the Apapa-Wharf Road gridlock constitutes to the economy when he noted that it is causing a loss of about N86 billion daily to businesses and residents. Apart from the traffic gridlock, Dangote also deplored the heavy presence of diverse task forces, including the Customs, on the highway checking and certifying goods. We agree with his suggestion that such checkpoints should not be mounted beyond the toll gates so that they do not continue to further compound an already intolerable scenario.
A state of emergency, even if informal, clearly exists in the Apapa axis, which requires drastic remediation. Given its crippling economic effect, everything should be done to ensure that work is accelerated on the ongoing reconstruction of the major road leading to the Apapa and Tin Can Ports being undertaken by Dangote Group, Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc and Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA) at a cost of N4.34 billion. The same goes for the ongoing palliative work on Apapa-Oshodi Expressway as well as the trailer park, which government is constructing off the expressway to decongest access roads to the ports.
