Lagos ports users pass through the proverbial eye of a needle to conduct business, going by a recent revelation. At Tin Can Island and Apapa Seaports, they are compelled to obtain a combined 110 signatures before their goods could be cleared. This is gross inefficiency at work. The process inadvertently enfeebles the ports, just as it fuels massive corruption in the system. An immediate response from the Federal Government to this anomaly is required, as it goes against the grains of the reforms in 2006, and even the 2011 reduction of the number of government agencies at the ports, all aimed at promoting operational efficiency.
It is just as well that the port users made this revelation during their interactive session with the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, who was mandated by President Muhammadu Buhari to initiate reforms to sanitise the system. Ali is less than three months in office.
According to the details, an importer or exporter using the Tin Can Island Port obtains 70 signatures, while, at Apapa port, 40 signatures must be secured to complete a transaction. This exposé corroborates an earlier corruption risk assessment report by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission and the Bureau of Public Procurement, aided by the United Nations Development Programme, which affirmed that a minimum of 79 signatures were needed for any good to be cleared at the ports.
Bureaucratic bottlenecks had, for many years, dogged ports operations in the country, causing pains to importers, exemplified in multiple tariff payments, huge demurrage, vandalism of goods and tying down of their business capital. Equally significant is the huge revenue loss Nigeria suffers following importers’ diversion of their cargoes to neighbouring ports such as Cotonou in Benin Republic, Lome in Togo, Accra and Tema in Ghana. The goods are then smuggled into Nigeria with the connivance of a chain of corrupt law enforcement agents.
Abuja had in 2011 responded to this red tape when it withdrew 10 agencies from the ports and retained just five of them: the NCS, Nigeria Immigration Service, Department of State Services, Ports Police and Ports Health, while the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Directorate of Naval Intelligence, Federal Environmental Protection Agency, among other agencies, were expelled.
Nigeria must strive not to lose its status as the regional maritime hub. In a bid to improve efficiency and make the ports the preferred cargo destination in the sub-region, the Federal Government handed over their operations to concessionaires in 2006. But stakeholders think that this has yet to reflect in the cost of transactions at the ports. Therefore, they call for the establishment of a commercial regulator to check the excesses of the ports managers. “There are lots of complaints about ports congestion, arbitrary charges, lack of manpower and equipment; and all you experience is the transfer of blame or responsibility from one agency to the other,” says John Ofobike, a former chairman, Association of Nigerian Licenced Customs Agents.
Such a proposition makes a lot of sense, given the fact that Nigeria continues to be poorly ranked in the global Ease of Doing Business report. In the 2015 rankings released by the World Bank last week, the country was in the 169th position out of 189 nations. While Nigerian stakeholders may endure the shortcomings of our ports without end, foreign investors, whose business are inexorably linked with shipping, will definitely not. Time is always of essence in business.
Therefore, making the ports competitive will stop Nigeria’s loss of job opportunities in freight and forwarding, and revenue to Benin Republic, whose Cotonou port has become attractive to many of our importers. While bemoaning the tendency to supplant public monopoly with private monopoly at our ports, because of intolerable excesses, Hassan Bello, the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Shippers’ Council, last year ominously cautioned that it was the shippers that decided where their cargoes went.
With the introduction of the Pre-Arrival Assessment Report, the goal of stakeholders is to achieve 48-hour goods clearance. However, this will for long remain a dream until all the operators achieve full automation of services. Automation reduces manual handling of documents, thereby fast-tracking operations. By keeping physical contact to the barest minimum, the frontiers of compromise or graft are invariably narrowed. These inadequacies were the basis for the submission of a maritime consultant, Michael Ivenso, at an NSC seminar in May 2014 that “Nigeria is losing $16 billion annually for not doing what it ought to do at the ports.”
This is an ugly trend the government has to buck if Nigeria is to maximally gain from the Lagos ports, and compete favourably with South Africa’s Durban port, which handled about 44.8 million tonnes of cargo between 2013 and 2014; and Suez Canal Port in Egypt, which handled 962.7 million tonnes in 2012; as against the 53.5 million tonnes and 7.1 million tonnes for inward and outward operations respectively, handled by our ports between 2007 and 2014, according to container traffic statistics at Nigerian ports.
