Determined to sustain traffic orderliness along the port corridor, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), has issued a stern warning against the perpetrators of illegally stripping containers along the port access road.
The Ports Authority said that truckers caught in the act stand the risk of being delisted from the Electronic Call-up System (eto) platform managed by the Truck Transit Park (TTP) Limited.
Mohammed Bello-Koko, managing director of the NPA, issued the above warning in Lagos at the weekend when he paid an unscheduled visit to Tin-Can Island Port to inspect designated container stripping yards and the port access roads to ensure trucks are not loitering.
Bello-Koko said container stripping constitutes a menace and adds to traffic congestion along the port access when undertaken outside designated yards.
According to him, it also creates room for trucks to park indiscriminately along the port access roads, resulting in traffic disruptions and attendant chaos.
He said the NPA will intensify its vigilance and monitoring to nip the negative trend in the bud.
He said that such unannounced on-the-spot visits would become more frequent and would be followed by regular stakeholder engagements to improve the seamless operations of the eto platform continuously.
He also warned that stripping yards that violate the operational rules will face temporal shutdowns for first-time offenders, and the possibility of non-renewal of land leases for recalcitrant offenders.
Bello-Koko said that these stringent measures are geared towards maintaining orderliness and safety within the port environment.
Addressing the scarcity in some of the stripping yards, he attributed the low volume to the impact of global economic upheavals on cargo flow. He reiterated that a business downturn cannot be justification for illegality.
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He, however, disclosed that proposals for well-equipped stripping yards, referred to as ‘devanning yards’ are receiving accelerated attention, signalling a shift from illegal roadside stripping.
On the sustainability of the measures put in place by the NPA to stop container stripping, he said the NPA has collaborated with other government agencies and the Lagos State Government to ensure that such unhealthy practices no longer take place along the port access road.
Similarly, the NPA boss also announced that the NPA has rolled out a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for barge operators, adding the SOP will serve as a guideline to all operators.
