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Kenya: Piracy And Arm Trafficking Delays Port Upgrade Plan
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
13 May 2008
Posted to the web 13 May 2008
Ben Sanga
The Mombasa port has its own fair share of challenges, including piracy in neighbouring Somalia, stowaways, and arms trafficking.
Investments needed to deal with such challenges are huge and increasing, thanks to other emerging global threats like drug trafficking, counterfeit goods, destruction of the environment and cyber crimes.
Other waves hitting the port include East African Community treaties that limit business to the region and transit cargo diversion to the local market.
Stakeholders, including Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) and the taxman have, however, taken cargo diversion head-on by installing a tracking device.
KPA management says it has initiated a series of security enhancement measures over the last seven years.
Twalib Khamis, the port's harbour master and chief operations manager, says that to successfully handle the challenges, more attention, resources and strategies would be needed.
Mr Khamis cites the porous coastline, political instability in Somalia, past terrorist attacks and the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nature of the region as some of the challenges facing the port.
The only consolation, however, is the reality that ports across the world face different problems.
European ports, for instance, operate under strict regulations and tariffs by the European Union.
At the port of Naples, the gateway to some 150,000 containers transported to China, there is hue and cry about the disappearance of transit goods.
According to the Italian customs authority, about 60 per cent of goods imported to Italy escape official inspection and about 20 per cent entry bills go unchecked.
A half a dozen other containers often have the same number attached to them as one container.
On the other hand, large areas of the port of Naples are the fiefdom of the city's leading Mafia clan - the Camorra.
KPA has in the past urged Kenya Revenue Authority to name and shame importers and clearing and forwarding firms fond of diverting transit cargo to the local market.
The clan is locally referred to as "the system" through which to get Chinese goods into the Italian market without paying tax, process them into high-quality goods and re-export them with huge profits.
These shady deals go on in spite of modern management techniques in use at the expansive port. In the hinterland is the free zone where heroin and cocaine are brought in and bagged.
The zones also provide hiding places where sweatshops turn black-market cloth and leather into top line fashion goods for Hollywood starlets.
To thrive on the security breach at the port, the clans are claimed to have bought adjacent plots with apartments, which are used as warehouses.
It is believed that the less distance the container travels the better for the deals. Reports show that the goings on at Naples compare with the goings on in boardroom battles. The rules are dictated or imposed on business trends, profits and victory over the competition.
Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah, was quoted in the Press in February as saying that anything else is worthless. And so as KPA announces that it had implemented a series of security improvements over the last seven years, more challenges continue to emerge.
To win the war, the stakeholders are asking for undivided attention, more resources and well researched strategies.
The port has initiated a number of projects aimed at upgrading the facility to conform to international standards or at least be able to handle the rising volume of work.
A new integrated security system is in place - putting the facility under improved and up to date surveillance.
However, security experts who talked on condition of anonymity rubbished the system, saying physical operations where people entering the facility are screened falls below international standards owing to the levels of sophistication in international trade.
They say the overall security apparatus at the port is outdated, giving the example of issuing visitors with gate passes.
The experts say the passes could easily be forged and transferred, explaining that there are no ways to verify the identity of the pass holder.
As a way forward, they propose the security management at the port should have a unique software and guard patrol monitoring system to enable the security supervisors to carry out a real time inspection.
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This should be extended to luggage screening system for the cruise ship terminal and installation of main and local security command and control centres systems.
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