World Bank’s intervention at the Apapa Ports may well prove that what the perennial gridlock needs is thinking
It could be said that Nigeria’s major sea ports in Apapa are metaphors for the state of the nation. For over a decade, the ports and their precincts have been associated with daily crippling gridlock.
The Apapa and Tin Can Island ports as well as the numerous jetties in that axis of Lagos once made up the maritime hub of the West Coast of Africa. They also served as entrepots for adjoining land-locked countries like Mali and Niger Republic. Not anymore.
In the last decade or more, the ports of Apapa have become hellish cul-de-sac of sorts where routine businesses are transacted with sorrow and anguish. It manifests in the form of traffic congestion that lasts for many hours daily.
The problem has been blamed on the usually large number of tankers and trucks plying the ports’ vicinities, and waiting to pick up cargo, especially petroleum products.
With the rail tracks servicing the ports long in disuse, every item of cargo going in or emanating from the ports has to be hauled with one form of truck or the other. What this means is that there is always congestion in the entire port areas occasioned by large number of vehicular movements.
Apart from the matter of the disused rail tracks, the roads leading in and out of the ports have failed almost irretrievably for more than 10 years. Several attempts to revamp them or completely modernise them have been to no avail.
Successive governments since 1999 have failed to find a lasting answer to this critical problem, and the issue of tankers clogging the precincts has remained intractable. There are probably no busier roads in the country, and none are more economically strategic or even more viable.
It is a positive development that the World Bank is poised to spend N12.2 billion ($40m) to clear the Apapa gridlock. Working in collaboration with the Nigerian Shipping Council (NSC), Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), and the National Freight Information and Transport Hub (NAFITH), the World Bank will provide the funding for setting up an electronic passage and for rehabilitating some of the roads around the ports.
According to the Executive Secretary of the NSC, Mr. Hassan Bello, “The fund is meant to improve logistics around the Apapa, Tincan and Orile areas. For every time there are over 5000 trucks on the axis… but what we need at any point in time is not more than 1500 trucks in that Apapa vicinity… what are the extra 3500 trucks doing there?” The electronic passage device to be installed will ensure that a truck is in Apapa only when it is needed.
There is no doubt that this scheme, when completed, would give a new lease of life to the ports of Lagos. But while we are at it, we urge the Federal Government and all the stakeholders to consider building modern trailer and tanker parks around the areas to absorb the trucks in waiting.
There is also an urgent need to repair the pipelines at Mosimi and Ejigbo depots so that tankers would have less need to go to the ports for petroleum products.
