Concessionaire to invest $27m on development of Dala Inland Port in Kano

The concessionaire in charge of developing the Dala Inland Port in Kano is expected to put in a total of USD$27 million into the port project.

Ahmed Rabiu, managing director of Dala Inland Port, said during a recent inspection of the port project site at Zawaciki, in Kumbotso Local Government Area of Kano State, that the first phase of the project would be completed by June at the cost of USD$17 million.

The idea of building the dry port otherwise known as Inland Container Depots (ICD’s), which was conceived years ago by the Federal Government, was to bring shipping services to the door step of shippers across the nation, and assist in decongesting the seaports and making them more user friendly.

ICDs receives containers by rail or road from the seaport for examination and clearance by Customs and other competent authorities. There are seven approved locations for the Inland Container Depots and they include Isiala-Ngwa in Aba; Erunmu in Ibadan; Heipang in Jos; Zawachiki in Kano; Zamfarawa in Funtua, Jos; Jauri in Maiduguri and ICNL in Kaduna.

Dala Inland Port, which is expected to take-off by the end of 2022, would also provide over 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Late last year, Kano State Government announced that it has allocated about N2.3 billion for the construction of the access road to the port, building of perimeter fence, electricity and water supply at the port site.

Rabiu said the port, when completed would compete favourably with Ports in Lagos in terms of revenue generation and reduction in loss of containers while on transit between Lagos and Kano.

Dala Inland Dry Port, when completed will help bring down the cost of transporting containers from Lagos Port to warehouses in Kano, which cost over N1.2 million to haul container from Lagos to Kano by road. However, with rail line that would be connected to the inland dry port, containers can be moved to Kano from Lagos for just N200,000,” he said.

The port project, which is being built on 200 hectares of land designated as a Special Economic Zone, would be built with a capacity to accommodate about 30,000 Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) of containers.

BusinessDay recalls that Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano State is presently championing the course of ensuring that the port is declared as a Port of Origin and Destination where cargo can originate from or consigned to.

The Governor has also implored the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) to extend its rail line to the dry port in order to facilitate seamless cargo evacuation.