Saving Apapa from terminal decay

The explosion last Wednesday of a tanker loaded with fuel from a tank farm in the Creek Road area of Apapa and the debilitating road congestion experiences in recent times in Apapa brings home the strangulating environment in Apapa.

Apapa, home to Nigeria’s premier port which used to be an orderly business and choice residential location for the elite and expatriates has fast degenerated with flooded streets, perennial traffic congestions owing to the huge innumerable presence of tankers that move petroleum products from the tank farms in the area, and the traditional container carrying trucks that move cargoes from Apapa ports.

To make things worse for Apapa, drainage has been an issue causing flooding in the rainy season thus clogging traffic. The long bad portions of the Oshodi-Apapa road have perennially contributed to slow traffic in and out of Apapa. The indiscriminate and wrongful parking of tanker trucks on the Oshodi- Apapa route has blocked entirely that route to A papa leading to a diversion of traffic to the Western Avenue-Ijora route to Apapa which is also ridden with bad portions that hinder vehicular traffic.

Apapa is a typical case of how not to maintain city infrastructures, and symbolises the absence of urban planning. It is disturbing that even with the huge revenues running into trillions of Naira that The Apapa and Tin can ports generate for the Federal government, Apapa area is still an endangered space. 

 Apapa, the once prosperous and enticing commercial and industrial enclave in Lagos is dying and it would appear none in government cares, despite the federal government earning as much as one trillion naira in revenues from the community annually.

 Set apart by its close proximity to the water, Apapa is divided into a commercial section and a residential neighbourhood, the Government Residential Area (GRA) with its wooden streets and which in its glory days was home to political heavyweights like the best known face of the modern Yoruba and premier of the Western region, Obafemi Awolowo.

 Residents blame the steady degeneration of Apapa on the uncontrolled permits for petrol tank farms granted under shady circumstances to politically    connected businessmen and demand for fuel from their farms has been helped by monumental collapse of the nation’s refineries and the multi-billion dollar pipeline network, which means that Lagos remains the only viable source of supply for the fuel required to keep the nation going.

 The situation has been compounded by the chaos inside the two seaports in Apapa where parking lots for  container bearing vehicles have been converted to other uses without alternatives being provided.

 The gridlock within Apapa became worse years after the port terminals were concessioned to the private sector. The port in the pre-concession era had spaces which served as parks for tankers and trailers. The federal government in 2006 following the concessioning, allotted the spaces to private terminal operators, thereby forcing the trucks out to park indiscriminately on roads leading in and out of Apapa.

 An alternative parking lot (of about 500 capacity) constructed opposite the Tin Can port has so far not been completed almost four years after it was awarded to Borini Prono, an Italian firm. It was designed to be completed in July 2013, while public private partnership (PPP) arrangement to have another trailer park constructed within the Lagos Trade Fair Complex in Ojo to accommodate 5,000 trucks is yet to see the light of the day.

 Today, more than half of the offices along Creek road and Wharf road, the worst hit areas of the commercial district, have either been vacated or are on the verge of being relocated outside Apapa.

The negative impact of these strangulating conditions in Apapa is multiple. Properties in Apapa are steadily losing value, man hours are spent on traffic by those who work or live in the area with health consequences. Residents and businesses are leaving the area. Delays in movement of cargo out of Apapa is taking its toll on the business of manufacturers and companies.

We urge the Federal and Lagos state governments to come together and work out a regeneration plan for  Apapa and save what is rightly a revenue generating urban space from terminal decay.