Leadership (Abuja)
Jerry Uwah
13 January 2009
Benjamin Adekunle has a penchant for excesses. However, the controversial brigadier-general has a way of getting things done with brutal efficiency. As commander of the notorious Third Marine Commando during the civil war, Adekunle gave the rebels some sleepless nights until he was ordered out of the frontline, apparently for battlefield excesses.
A few years later, he was called in to clear an unprecedented port congestion caused largely by the infamous cement armada. The combatant general used controversial and unorthodox means to decongest the port on record time.
Some reports have it that as the cement armada kept ships waiting for months on end to berth, Adekunle responded to the maritime gridlock by ordering that ships with consignment of hardened cement be compelled to empty their cargo into the sea and head back home. His argument was that hardened cement was not useful to anyone and so had no business congesting the port. They were therefore disposed of. That, in addition to other hard decisions, played the trick. No one cared to know that the cement expired as a result of the long wait at the port.
President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua needs someone with the brutal efficiency of Adekunle to decongest the ports and get the economy moving again. The port congestion now menacing and embarrassing Nigeria is something of a paradox. Nigeria is entering an advanced stage of de-industrialisation.
The textile industry, hitherto the highest employer of labour, has collapsed. The two tyre manufacturing companies in the land have closed shop. What is left of the manufacturing arm of the economy has been incapacitated by an odd combination of epileptic power supply, crater-riddled roads and inept transportation system. No one expects port congestion under such scenario.
It could therefore be argued that the ensuing maritime gridlock is more of the product of corruption and inefficiency than over-stretched port capacity.
The genesis of the congestion seems to buttress this argument. The build-up of cargoes in the ports started in July 2008 when Hamman Bello Ahmed, as new comptroller-general of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), set up an 82-man surveillance squad to check the excesses of his junior colleagues at the ports. Since then, everything has slipped out of control.
All that has been achieved so far is endless buck-passing. The NCS blames importers for false declaration, under-declaration and outright importation of contraband for the massive build-up at the port. Importers and their agents blame the customs and the more than a dozen government agents at the ports for lengthening clearing procedures. Port operators blame the NCS for duplication of goods inspection procedures while some others blame the port operators themselves for lack of equipment.
At the end of the day everybody is a loser. The federal government loses huge revenues on a daily basis as ships are diverted to more efficient ports in neighbouring West African countries. Importers pay huge sums in demurrage ranging from N3, 500 to N7, 000 daily on each container (depending on the size). Besides, ship owners around the world are responding to the worsening turnaround time for their vessels in Nigerian ports with a subtle threat of boycotting the nation's ports.
Worse still, the nation's production lines are being crippled as critical raw materials are held up at the ports.
On assumption of office, Ahmed had promptly constituted the 82-man squad with powers to intercept cleared containers and ensure strict compliance with prescribed import tariff. Customs men already operating at the ports regarded the squad as a fifth column and treated it with suspicion. Soon, a scene of parallel inspection of containers was set in motion.
The presence of the squad at the port had the twin effect of not only slowing down the clearing process but also scaring away dubious clearing agents who were collaborating with fraudulent customs officers to rob the nation of the much-needed import duties.
Most of the clearing agents took to their heels, abandoning the goods they were meant to clear for their clients. By then, it was obvious that most of the containers cleared by the officers on duty at the ports were laden with contrabands, false declaration and concealed goods. The squad therefore had reasons to dig in and continue its surveillance. By the end of the third quarter of 2008, the ports were bursting at the seams with goods waiting to be cleared.
The port congestion was also worsened by the lacklustre attitude of terminal operators to investment in the terminals concessioned to them by the federal government under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Some of them have powerful connections in the corridors of power who could protect them from the prying eyes of a castrated regulator of the ports that the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) had become under the concessioning exercise. They could therefore afford to ignore the crucial issue of investing in the terminals. Consequently, many of them lack the equipment to position containers for the 100 per cent Inspection that the NCS insists on doing under "destination inspection".
The NCS itself is not helping matters. Besides the rivalry between the Ahmed squad and the conventional officers at the ports, which has resulted in avoidable duplication of functions, the NCS officers are still doing things the old way.
Under normal circumstances, clearing documents are supposed to be processed without human contact. The process is designed to reduce the chances of importers or their agents compromising NCS officials. But there are instances where NCS officials deliberately sit on clearing documents to compel importers and their clearing agents to make personal contacts with them for obvious reasons.
The result of all this is that close to 20,000 containers are block-stacked at ports waiting to be cleared. Besides, an additional 9,500 are in ships in the nation's territorial waters waiting for their turn to berth, while 1,000 containers already cleared are yet to be evacuated. There is just no space even for equipment to operate freely.
Block-stacking is an importer's nightmare. When it is your turn to clear the consignment, the search for the container tucked away in the block-stack could prove as Herculean as finding a pin in a hay-stack. That is what port congestion has imposed on importers and clearing agents.
As regards Lagos ports, their problem is partially the fallout of the mega-city posture that Lagos has assumed in recent times. There is basically no room for expansion at the ports. Lagos port received 22 million metric tons of cargo in 1978. Since then, there has been at least 50 per cent increase in cargo traffic, while facilities at the ports remain fixed at the 1978 level.
These are some of the stark realities that the federal government has to confront sooner or later to avert a future occurrence.
As a nation, we are used to finding ad-hoc solutions to problems. Ironically the port congestion problem is a peculiar one. Someone has to fashion out a lasting solution to the static facilities at the ports and address the systemic corruption and inefficiency responsible for the maritime gridlock.
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