Shippers advocate $1,000 fine on defaulting shipping companies

Obadayo Amoo |

Shippers in Lagos State have advocated a stiff penalty of $1000 fine on shipping companies that fail to return empty containers to the country of origin after one month in the port.

The president of Shippers’ Association of Lagos State, Reverend Jonathan Nicol made the call while speaking in Lagos.

While supporting the call by the Council for stoppage of container deposit, Nicol stated that fine should be slammed on the shipping companies for making Nigeria a dumping ground for their containers that are no longer useable.

Speaking further, Nicol said some of the containers had become bad in the process of bringing them into the country hence the unwillingness on the part of the shipping companies to return them because according to him, they have nowhere to take them back to.

Nicol said, “So, all these are infractions and I think Nigerian shippers have been bastardized more than enough in so many ways and the business is dying slowly.

“So, I don’t blame Shippers’ Council for trying to abolish container deposit, in fact they should go further to say any empty container that remains in Nigeria above one month, they will pay $1,000 per day for the number of days”.

Narrating his experience, he said, “I brought some electrical equipment through Grimaldi and it rained heavily and those things don’t go with water. So, when we opened the container for examination, most of them were with water. The good thing is that they were well packaged and they took photographs of it and they said to us, by the time you offload, if there is any damage, they will pay.

“Such containers will not go back to Europe and they are placing deposit on that and when eventually you return that container, they will not be able to export it because they don’t have a place to send that container to.

“That is why we have so many containers all over the country because they can’t return them to Europe and they are collecting deposit from it. It is not fair”.

“Go to TICT, you see stacks of containers up to ten, those days they won’t allow you to stack containers like that, the highest you could go is five containers but now you have ten stacks of empty containers.

“Why can’t they export them? It is because they cannot export them back to Europe?” he queried.

Nicol however called on the government to slam the fine on the shipping agencies in dollars since they also measure their demurrage in dollars, saying Nigeria is not a dumping ground.

He recalled that there was nothing like container deposit at the beginning, saying all the shipper needed to do was to make sure that the empty container was returned in due time.

He expressed shock how the deposit has progressed from N50,000 to N400,000, adding that the containers they collect the demurrage for are bad ones that cannot be returned to the country of origin.

“Then suddenly, we started getting N50,000 to N100,000 to N200,000 and now to N400,000 and most of these containers they are bringing now are containers they cannot return back to Europe,” he maintained.