Apapa port is over-stretched beyond its capacity - Hassan Bello

By Dapo Olawuni

The Executive Secretary of Nigerian Shippers’ Council, Barrister Hassan Bello has given an insight into what could be the cause of the intractable traffic gridlock currently ravaging the Apapa port when he lamented that the premier port has been stretched beyond its capacity to a breaking point.

While giving an overview of the menace plaguing the Apapa port and its possible solution, the shippers’ council boss advocated for total control of the port by the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) in a bid to restore sanity to the chaotic situation.

In an interactive session with journalists in Lagos, Bello attributed the current confusion at the Apapa port to attitudinal deficiency of the people who lack capacity to obey rules and regulations.

“The whole of Apapa should be owned by the NPA, it should have the whole port area under its control, but because of the confusion and chaos, and the seeming attitude of not obeying rules, many things were built”

“You cannot build a single block of anything, a gas station, a single kiosk or anything, without consulting the NPA because they are the landlords, they should have the port plan so that we can have ease”

“So, now we are paying for chaos and lack of respect for authority, but this would be mitigated very soon”

Bello said the ports were built to certain capacity, but now the capacity has been overstretched.
The Shippers Council boss added that the unimodal approach of transporting cargoes only by road has failed.

He said “we need multi modal approach to evacuation of cargoes, the rail, the waterways and the pipelines. If we have the pipelines, we wouldn’t need the tank farms, and tankers will not have to come to Apapa”

On the recent movement of articulated trucks from Apapa roads by the Presidential Task Force set up by President Muhammadu Buhari, Bello said that setting up task forces is not the major solution to the Apapa traffic.

“Task forces is not the solution, the solution is to establish a system, you could refuse access to freight seeking truckers, they line up so that they can get loaded, this doesn’t happen anywhere, it is a system that we are now going to establish, the NPA is on top of it, they are working to establish a call up system which would regulate the approaches to the port unless you have something to do”

“The government is deliberately tackling the decay on the Apapa roads, creek road, Liverpool and Tin Can, when the roads are opened, there would be flow of traffic.
Most importantly we need parking spaces and holding bays”

“We are talking to NPA to give 30% waiver on charges within the period, it is a temporary arrangement which I call general average sacrifice in order to save the situation”

“When a ship is about to capsize, we have a general average situation whereby some cargoes are thrown overboard in order for the ship to survive”

Bello said that everybody is coming along in order for the situation to be resolved.

“The former task force failed because there was no coming of might, but now we have the political backing of this government”