The business of using barges to move containers from the port to off-dock locations is now worth N10 billion in annual transactions as more shippers adopt alternative means of moving their containers from the mother port to off-dock location, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), has said.
Speaking in Abuja on Tuesday during the 55th session of State House Briefing which was monitored via live stream on YouTube, Mohammed Bello-Koko, the managing director of the NPA, said that since the introduction of cargo movement using barges over 500,000 twenty-foot equivalent units of container (TEUs) have been moved through the channels from one location to the another.
He said the container barge industry has also created over 25,000 direct and indirect jobs in the country.
According to him, the NPA in the past was relying completely on cargo evacuation by road, until it realised that moving 100 percent of imports and export by road is not efficient or sustainable.
“But working with the Nigerian Railway Corporations (NRC), the NPA ensured that the rail lines were connected to the port. We also introduced barge operation for movement of cargoes from one location to another off-dock location,” he said.
On the efforts of the NPA in reducing the red tape and bureaucratic bottlenecks hindering effective export trade, Bello-Koko said the NPA, Customs, and other government agencies are working together to deploy the National Single Window, a platform that would make it easier, and will help to reduce the quantum of documents that an exporter has to fill before his or her export cargo can leave the port.
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According to him, the NPA, Customs, and the Central Bank of Nigeria were given the mandate to work together to streamline the export documentation in order to reduce red tape and ensure that export cargo moved as quickly as possible.
Bello-Koko, who decried that the documentation that an exporter has to fill in Nigerian Ports is very cumbersome, said the NPA may be interested in the volume while another agency may be interested in the type of cargo to enable it to charge the tariff.
He said with National Single Window all the information that all the government agencies need would be located in one single platform. He added that it is due to this reason that the NPA is working to set up 10 export processing terminals that will have Customs, SON, NAFDAC, and other government agencies involved in export processing terminals at one location.
On the vandalisation of port infrastructure, the NPA boss said Nigeria is losing a lot of money to the issue of stolen fairway buoys on the port channels.
“We have been to forums where shipping companies would decline to visit Nigerian ports especially Warri and Calabar due to lack of buoys on the channels. These ships need the buoys to aid their navigation along the channel, and the absence of which could make a vessel go aground. This was why the NPA has been appealing to port communities and educating them on the importance of the buoys to port operations as well as the cost implication of not having them on the channel,” he said.
