As the prices of crude oil continue to dwindling in the international market, there is need for Nigeria to shift from depending on oil revenue by opening up and tapping into the opportunities inherent in the nation’s Blue Economy, Hadiza Bala Usman, managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), has said.
She also discovered that the NPA generated a total of N291 billion as revenue in the first 10 months of 2020, between January and October.
Speaking recently during a live conservation on the Morning Show on Arise TV, Usman, who noted that blue economy is huge, said Nigeria needs to work very well to tap into it.
“It should be one of our key revenue areas that need to be tapped into considering the weakening oil prices in the international market. However, there are areas that we need to improve upon. For instance, we are keen to have deeper seaports with bigger draft that would enable bigger vessels to come to into the country,” the NPA boss said.
According to her, Nigeria right now has ports with 13 meters draft when the global depth is 16-17 meters, and that is why NPA is keen to having Lekki Deep Seaport come onboard.
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One of things that we are also concern about, she said, is the turnaround time of vessels and the inspection period of cargo.
“How effective are the inspection agencies and the clearing processes? Imagine 1.2 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) of containers imported into the country are being inspected physically. Nigeria Customs is keen at deploying scanners to the port to enable those processes to be done efficiently in order to eliminate opening of every container that comes into the country,” Usman explained.
While noting that outside the NPA’s direct mandate, that the authority is also keen at opening up the dry-docking industry, the NPA boss described dry-docking business as a huge revenue earner looking at the number of vessels coming into the country annually.
“If we mandate those vessels to service in-country, it will bring in huge revenue to the economy. On our part, we have given discount on harbour dues to vessels coming into the country to dry-dock. Right now, they go to Ghana and Senegal to dry-dock because we do not have dry-docking facilities that are of international standards. That is one of the huge untapped areas that we need to focus on to make revenue,” she said.
Citing example, she said that a company that formerly used to take its vessels to Ghana started dry-docking in Nigeria after the discount, which NPA gave. She however said that government has to provide the legal and regulatory framework needed to open up the industry.
“This is what we have done on our part, and we encourage private sector to develop these dockyards. We also encourage other agencies in this sector to see what they can do to open-up dry-docking business to ensure we have more within the blue economy. More importantly is the legal and regulatory obligations as well as compliance to contractual agreements. The Federal Government also needs to prioritise the interest of the citizens when it comes to any contractual obligations,” she said.
On the revenue, she noted that the N291 billion generated in the first 10 months of the year was in contrast to the N298 billion collected in the 12 months of 2019. She further said that another one month is left for the authority to surpass the 2019 record.
She however said that despite challenges in the economy due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the Nigerian ports’ revenue in the period under review was still at marginal difference compared to that of last year.
“In November to December, we may be able to meet up to what we made in 2019. There was reduction this year but it was not huge in terms of revenue,” she added.
