The co-founder and CEO of Truck Transit Parks, Jama Onwubuariri, details how his company is leveraging digital mobility infrastructure to revolutionise truck traffic management at Apapa and Tincan ports in Lagos.
Managing Nigeria's port delays and traffic which for years have had dire implications for trade, investment, competitiveness, supply chain efficiency as well as haulage and input costs, has been the prime focus of Truck Transit Parks (TTP) for nearly half a decade.
Beyond the adverse economic impact of the congestion, other pain points include its adverse effects on the way locals around the Apapa and Tincan ports access corridors live their lives. TTP's Co-Founder and CEO Jama Onwubuariri took PREMIUM TIMES through how his team has been deploying Internet of Things via Eto call-up system - a digital mobility app - to ease truck movement, improve cargo delivery time, eliminate middlemen interference and rid the process of extortion. Early outcomes, he said, include orderliness, timeliness, predictability and revenue assurance for businesses.
PT: To begin, talk us through how a truck park works?
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Basically, this is a combination of infrastructure, technology and management of stakeholders. In a port city like Apapa and Tincan, you have about 2,500 to 3,500 trucks heading into the ports on a daily basis. And in addition to this, you have about 750 to about 1,000 that are going to the tank farms that are particularly around the Tincan area. So you potentially have almost 5,000 trucks that are heading in one direction at any point in time within any 24-hour period. What this implies is that having 10 people who want to rush out of the door to catch maybe a bonanza or something that is outside the door, you're going to experience congestion because each one of them will want to be the first to get out of the door. So what the truck parking system, which we have institutionalised has achieved or how it works is that these 3,500 or 4,500 trucks, as the case may be, each day, will need to go into parking facilities at different locations within the port environment, depending on the direction they are coming from. And while they are there, the ports and the terminals will prepare to receive them. We also get them in based on a booking process. We call it scheduling. So they are scheduled to come in and they are scheduled to come out when the business they are going to the port for is ready for them. Scheduling used to be manual, and then we put in place a technology platform called Eto for doing so. So, if you have a business at the APMT or five-star terminal, you book on Eto and you select a truck park that is closest to you or that you prefer. That truck will go and wait until the terminal says, we're ready for this truck or this number of trucks in one hour, in 10 hours, in 15 hours, as the case may be. So you are checked out based on the invite you get from the terminal, which is your destination. And when you arrive, you are clocked in electronically based on the fact that you have a valid booking and there is a valid invitation from the terminal to receive it. So this ensures orderliness. It provides for predictability. It reduces the time hitherto spent by the trucks that are going to the ports. And it also reduces the cost of haulage because of that predictability and timeliness.
PT: The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry once estimated that Nigeria loses in the neighbourhood of N7.6 trillion to port congestion at the Apapa and Tincan ports alone annually. What difference is TTP out to make in reversing that trend?
Ok, I think that trend has already been reversed. The statistics you cited were valid up until 2020. From March 2021, we basically stopped that haemorrhage. And what are the initiatives, how this came in? I just explained how the truck parking system works and in terms of the impact and then the effect on this loss, which Nigeria was experiencing per annum. So the statistics that are cited is loss per annum. Before February 27 of 2021, you would typically pay about N1.5 million if you're going to evacuate a 40-foot container. Maybe N1.3 million, N1.2 million if you're evacuating a 20-foot container. Where does this money go to? Majority of that money would go to informal government and non-government actors. So you have navy, police, LASTMA, even sometimes soldiers from the Apapa barracks. They would come to control traffic. You need to have cash in hand before your truck can be invited to pass the very narrow path that is created. The rest of the trucks are on the gridlock and form and maintain the gridlock. So when you pay, depending on how much you pay and even who you pay to, you are allowed to go. Now, imagine a scenario where if you have three, four, five containers, you have to calculate N1.5 million times the number of containers you have, or you may even need to knock on the door that you are going to evacuate and you need to pay. What that means is that this money is not going into government coffers. It is not accounted for. There's no tax paid on it. And you then transfer that extra cost to the final consumer of the goods that are cleared or the goods that are being exported just for clearing of containers that are coming in. So, this is money that the Nigerian formal economy is losing just by that hike in informal payments for transportation. Now, the second area where we are also losing that money is in the demurrage charges that are being paid for overstayed containers, for overstayed cargo. When cargo comes in, there is an allowance, a time period within which the importer or the clearing agent is supposed to take those goods out of the ports. Now, because of the congestion, those goods overstay and then the shipper or importer is now forced to pay these demurrage charges. That is another way we lose money. So, you now have the delays itself in terms of somebody has ordered for goods, he expects that these goods will be delivered within a certain time, but because of the port congestion, the goods don't arrive then. Even if you don't pay anything extra in terms of transportation or haulage, the fact that the goods arrive late results in loss for you because that's loss of business opportunity, time value of money, and perhaps the order that has been made by the customer may be fulfilled by someone else. So, these are ways Nigeria was losing this N7 trillion per annum. But by ensuring that trucks no longer queue on the road for days, by ensuring that there is orderliness, timeliness, and predictability to movement of trucks and cargo in and out of the ports, you no longer have to pay N1.5 million. Today it's about N350,000. That's almost 70 per cent reduction in the cost of just haulage alone. The fact that you don't need to spend two weeks, now you have to spend between hours to two days also is a reduction in both cost and also in time. The fact that Nigeria's exports today have improved between 2021 and 2025 ending as in the volume of tons of containers and goods, which we export has increased by over 700 per cent in five years, is also evidence that that trend has been reversed
There is a collaboration between ourselves as private operators, other stakeholders within the maritime industry, and also the government agencies - the police, LASTMA, Nigerian Port Authority and the Lagos State Government. So the partition or the division of roles has ensured that each stakeholder is very much aware of their responsibilities and also benefits from this collaboration. Before now, there was no timeline. Before 2021, there was no timeline for trucks to go to the port. At any time of day or night, the truck can hit the road. And if there's congestion, they simply stay there. But when we came on board, I worked with the Lagos State Ministry of Transportation and the traffic management department of the Nigerian Ports Authority to establish what we call traffic timing. For each category of truck that are going to the ports, there are time belts. There's a window within which they should move. That ensures that you don't have four vehicles on the road at any one time. The second is there are sometimes two truck moves. Between 6 O'clock and 8 o'clock and 10 o'clock in the morning, there is also a pause on the movement of trucks into the ports. This ensures that commuters, people who are going to work, or who are leaving the port for work, or those who are returning to their homes in Apapa and Tincan, will have a free access on the road. The impact of this is very much evident for all to see.
PT: What major milestones has TTP achieved in reducing port congestion in Nigeria between the time it was established and now?
We've moved over three million trucks into and out of the port. So that's one major milestone. These are three million trucks or truck movements that could have contributed to the congestion that was there before we came on board. We've also ensured that the time it takes for a truck to go to the port is reduced from two to three weeks to about two days at the moment. We have also ensured that there is predictability. We also have data, data of how many trucks have entered and left the port in the past five years, how many trucks of a certain category be they export or import have gone in and come out, how many trucks have gone into each of the terminals. We have data drilled down and filtered to how long each truck spent in the port before it came out. So if the government wants to monitor and manage efficiency of each of the terminal relative to each other and each of the terminals in Nigeria relative to terminals in ports in other countries, that data is available. We've also generated income for the federal government and for associated businesses within their public environments, especially those of them that used to have these truck parks by but were never used. We also have ensured that each of the terminals now have a means of monitoring their own efficiency, their speed of operations, and they have data that they can use for service improvement. By integrating Eto with the CBN's Nigeria Export Proceeds Platform, we now have a means of ensuring that trucks that are going to the port with exports don't need to be inspected when they are in the ports. The inspection is now done at export processing terminals and then they are booked into the port and they go straight to the queue site for onward exits from the ports without the additional checks that customs used to do. That is now done elsewhere.
PT: In the past, a number of importers had had to divert their cargos to nearby ports in Togo, Benin Republic, Ghana among others to avert high demurrage. The economic loss has been dire for Nigeria. What has TTP done differently to turn the tide?
By ensuring that you can predict how long it will take you to evacuate cargo that you bring into the ports, we have turned that tide. One of the indicators of that is that the throughput or the traffic of trucks or the vessels that are coming into Nigeria, Nigerian ports, Apapa and Tincan, has gone up in the past five years. You also have a higher number of truck traffic going into and out of the ports, showing that these are trucks that ordinarily would have gone to Togo or have gone to Benin to bring in cargo that was meant for the Nigerian market. We also have ensured that the cost of evacuation of cargo here is less than it used to be before. In fact, one of the direct, maybe one can say negative impact of clearing the roads and making it faster for trucks to go in and come out is that the barge business which used to be the preference of those who wanted to evacuate faster and who do not want to deal with all the mess on the road. That business is no longer very profitable because the roads are now very clear. They are faster even than using the barges. There's no economic necessity for someone to put a container on a barge as at today. The traffic of trucks that are going to these neighbouring ports has also reduced, but has not been eliminated.
PT: How does the Eto Truck Call-up application operate?
Eto is a scheduling, booking and traffic management platform. Eto collates the data of all the trucks that are heading into all the terminals within the ports and then it synchronises that with the requests made by shippers or transporters to visit or call on each of these terminals. Assuming Terminal A is able to do 500 trucks a day, Terminal B is able to do 300 and Terminal C is able to do 200. That's a thousand trucks to be processed within a day. What it does is to assign on a first-come-first-processed basis to each of these trucks. So as you make your booking, indicate the terminal you're going, you have a sort of queue, an electronic queue number. That queue number determines when the terminal says we are ready, who goes first, who follows next, who comes third? And if there's a congestion within the terminal or congestion along the port access roads, who gets to wait at what point? So all of this is done automatically. There's no human interference or human intervention. We've fully integrated artificial intelligence in how it does booking and scheduling of these trucks. In order to determine how many of these trucks are going to go to terminal A, B, or C, we also integrate with the platform of those standing apps. So they indicate on their profile on Eto, this is a number of trucks we are in a position to process today. So that means how many people go, and then based on the scheduling that's already part of the Eto architecture, who goes first and who goes second. We also have our own staff who are at these port gates. We call them gate control officers. They are also scheduled electronically, who should go to which gates, which day, which shift, and what time. So this is also automated. It ensures that there is accurate data as to who has gone where and what has each terminal done in a day. And it also ensures that there is visibility to all stakeholders, depending on their roles, as to what has your team or your unit done today, done last week, done in the past five years.
PT: What changes did Eto introduce in turnaround time and logistics planning for businesses?
So, in terms of turnaround time, Eto introduced predictability, orderliness, and revenue assurance. Predictability in the sense that, like I said earlier, you could plan that my truck is going to go into the truck park today, and by tomorrow it will be in the port, and by tomorrow it will leave the port, and next tomorrow it will repeat the process. It will go in again to the park, to the port, and then out. So that is predictability. Orderliness in the sense that we don't have 50, 100, 1,000 just linked for just a very limited space on the road or at the port gate. Orderliness also in the sense that each terminal can reasonably predict this is how many trucks we are going to process today. And when there is perhaps mechanical failure or systems malfunction, they will also indicate to us and the inflow of trucks is reduced. Revenue assurance, in the sense that a transporter could reasonably now predict that I have ten trucks on my fleet, each of these trucks doing three trips into the ports per week, this is how much I'm going to make it a month, in a year, as the case may be. The terminal operators are also able to predict that when the traffic flow into our ports or into our terminal, this is the number of cargo we are going to treat, evacuate, or receive within a certain period of time.
PT: Has the response of operators and other port users to using tech to solve logistic problems been encouraging?
It wasn't easy at the beginning because a lot of people were not digitally literate, especially the truck drivers. But for the terminal operators, the response has been positive largely because they also were using technology to some extent in their operations. And this was how they could manage operations across many terminals across the world for some of them that are international terminal operators. But with time, and it wasn't just Nigeria, it wasn't just the Apapa maritime economy, but also around the world. Like I said earlier, we've integrated artificial intelligence into how we code and also how we schedule trucks and even schedule our own teams for their daily beats. And this has also impacted the ease of use of our application as more people become familiar with it and as improvements on the app itself is done based on customers' feedback. So when we interviewed our users - the terminal operators, the transporters and the shipping agents every month - the feedback has been 94% on the average positive.
PT: What major hurdles have you had to cross in the last five years in digitalising a largely manual process of handling truck traffic in a place like Nigeria where adopting technology in doing things is still relatively far behind what you will see in many parts of the world?
Number one is lack of digital literacy, like I just mentioned. So, some of the truck drivers find it difficult to make a booking by themselves and an informal market sort of developed where people would act as middlemen. They will ask you, "what booking do you want to make?" Then, they go make a booking because they understand it themselves. And then they hike the price. So instead of you booking for a typical movement to the port. Instead of N10,000, they could charge you N50,000. So that affected our ultimate users. And that slowed things down because people, some could not do self-service. Most could, but some couldn't do self-service. So lack of digital literacy was a challenge. The second challenge was stakeholders who were benefiting from the chaos. There's a local African proverb that says that when the village is in chaos, the elders are usually the beneficiaries. So, there were some principalities and powers who were within the ecosystem, who were benefiting from the chaos. Like I said, there are those who would be responsible for traffic management. And the focus was on how much can we take from each person who needed to pass and go into the port? That was a second challenge that we experienced. We also had the challenge of some law enforcement agencies not cooperating with the first-come-first-served system. Some were still wishing that even after you have cooperated with the process, you have your tickets, you have your booking, but they'll still want to stop you and see how they can delay you, inconvenience you or you are forced to give them something before you pass. That was something that we had to work with the Lagos State Government and Nigerian Ports Authority to try to reduce. It's still work in progress.
PT: When you compare the way things were before Eto was introduced and now five years after, what will you say is different?
I will quote something that many of our stakeholders have repeated since 2021. They say the worst of Eto is better than the best of the system before it. So I will leave it at that. So, you can ask the rest of the stakeholders what their own opinion is, but this is just quoting something that has become a refrain since the past five years. It's very different between night and day in comparison.
PT: Your company has spoken of the necessity to see logistics tech like ETO not just as a mobility infrastructure but also as an economic infrastructure. And this is understandable, considering that the ease of moving goods across supply chains, which this system promises, can help businesses cut down transportation costs, improve the delivery time of goods and also reduce the entire time it takes manufacturers to turn raw materials into finished goods. How is the government stepping in to advance the adoption of digital platforms in order to advance the economic benefits of a system like this?
Transportation mobility infrastructure is not just a traffic management system, it's also an economic system. So by enhancing digital mobility infrastructure and technology, you are also able to enhance the economy. A lot of things that we do manually today, like looking for truck that will carry your cargo, looking for how to evacuate agricultural materials from farm clusters, these are things that have been automated and digitised in some other economies. What that means is that the same goods produced in Nigeria that are relying on manual processes, especially the ones relating to transport and logistics, will be much more expensive than the same products from other countries where digital systems are in place. So there is an economic cost to high haulage cost and traffic congestion to the Nigerian economy. And that makes goods manufactured in Nigeria to be uncompetitive. You can imagine that it is cheaper to import eggs from Turkey or import chicken from the UK than to produce the same chicken and eggs here. You can imagine why that would be the case. Because there are digital systems in the farming process and digital systems in the evacuation and haulage systems, which we currently lack. So, in terms of what the government is doing, commendably, the Nigerian government has now promised to launch the national single window in about a month's time. So that's very commendable. The more Nigerian government adopts and scales these systems, the better and more competitive Nigeria's economy will be.
PT: What policy and enforcement gaps became clear during the implementation of the Eto Call up System?
I'll tell you what happened. We were hearing from some enforcement agents that "see dis booking tin, e no go last o, e no dey pay us." Some said, "Oh, dis government people, dey no go let the thing last. After dey don notice say d thing no dey let dem make dem collect something from their pocket, dem go just cancel am." So there was this attitude that things that are digital, that do not require face-to-face interaction, that does not encourage informal exchange of favours or cash, would not be sustainable. So we understand that policy alignment and policy enforcement was going to be key. And we realised this even before we launched. So that was why we told both the Lagos State Government and the Nigerian Ports Authority that the success of the call-up system would depend on extortion-free enforcement. And we outlined what that extortion-free enforcement looked like. Each of the agencies that are on duty for enforcement of the call-up system must be people who are ethically sound. They must be individuals who are not easily swayed by personal benefits. They also must have a consequence for any breach of procedure. So this, I would say, is a work in progress, but I think it is clear to our partners and they understand this very clearly with us that the policy must also match with innovation. So if you have an app that says every truck must book, but then there's no policy that is backing that up, that app is not going to do anything.
PT: It is said that Eto app has been helpful in reducing extortion around port corridors. Transporters and truckers obviously will be interested to know more about this. Can you explain this further?
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Before now, say February, January 2021, if you're a truck driver, or you're a shipper, or you're a clearing agent, or you're just a businessman who wanted to go pick up your cargo at the port, you would need to find some who knew someone who knew someone who was high up in the traffic management task force in Apapa, Tincan before you could reasonably expect that your truck would get to the point. So that middleman up to level three would increase the amount that you pay.
You can call that informal extortion. You agree to pay knowing that if you don't pay your trucks are not moving. There are also scenarios where payment has been made. Maybe an accident happens, a truck breaks down, and the road is blocked. And whether you have paid or you have not paid, you are all turned back, and you have to pay again for your truck to conclude its movement. There are also certain scenarios where there is a disconnect between enforcement task force Team A and enforcement tax force Team B, who are at different points on the road. So perhaps you pay to the head of the task force at this point and you get to this other point and those ones say, "oh dey neva inform us but if you wan pass now make you give us something if you know one person and make you wait until they come." So, that system, that chaotic system, encouraged extortion. So now that the requirement is that you need to have a booking and you can go to the port, nobody should stop you normally. But because some of these Nigerian factor elements remained, especially with regards to the enforcement agencies, we also developed a feature on the Eto app for reporting non-compliance. So a driver or a transporter is able to report that my truck was stopped at so-and-so location, manned by so-and-so person. You could take pictures and post them on that feature on the app. We don't need to know you. The app does not report to you. You don't need to put any information that relates to you. You can make that anonymous report and we can pass it on to either the Lagos State Government, the Nigerian Police, Customs, or Nigerian Ports Authority as the case may be. So this way, the enforcement teams know that they are being held accountable for what they do, and there could be accountability calls if there is a breach of process. So this is one way that the Eto app is helping to reduce and eliminate extortion.
PT: Can mobility reform realistically improve Nigeria's competitiveness in regional and global trade?
That's correct. So, you see, whether we are countries, economies or businesses, we are in a league. And if we are not improving the quality of our mobility systems, we will be relegated. Today, Nigeria has the highest population in Africa. It should ordinarily have the biggest economy, but it is not. It's about number four, number five now. It keeps changing. We also within West Africa are supposed to be the giant both economically, population-wise, innovation, and the rest. However, we are lagging behind. Let me just focus on the maritime, because our systems are not competitive. Recently, I spoke to the head of one of the maritime organisations in one of our neighbouring countries. And one of the things she told me was that they were surprised that they went ahead of Nigeria to put in place systems that discourage corruption in the maritime sector. And what this means is that if an investor is sitting down and calculating where they will place their investment, they will ask themselves, should I put it in country A or country B or country C? What are the factors that an investor will be looking at? Predictability, ease of doing business, ease of withdrawal of their capital when they have made their profits and also controls against anti-corruption tendencies. So if these systems are not in place within the maritime sector, then that economy, that country will not be a destination of choice. The extent to which our transport and mobility infrastructure are upgraded and world-class, to that extent will be more competitive and we can then take our place as the new giant of Africa.
PT: With the African Continental Free Trade Area built around the model of facilitating the movement of goods across countries within Africa with little or no barrier at the borders, is there any role that TTP is playing in reducing cross-border delays across Nigerian borders to the rest of Africa?
Part of what we're doing is to engage the Nigerian Customs Service and also the customs of our neighbouring countries in order to deploy more technology towards how goods and vehicles are processed when they are crossing these borders. The African Continental Free Trade Agreements and also the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme are meant to ensure seamless movement of people and cargos between these countries. But what typically happens is that you still have delays. You have cargo coming from Nigeria to Togo, to Ghana, to Ivory Coast, still being delayed sometimes for days at these borders even when these goods are actually not terminating in these countries where they are being delayed. They are supposed to be passed through. So because of lack of synergy, especially in the digital space, between the customs of each of these countries on the corridor, you still experience delays by vehicles and also by cargos that are moving. So our engagement with the Nigerian customs and the customs of these neighbouring countries is to deploy a single technology that communicates with each other. True, some systems are being implemented by ECOWAS in order to achieve this, but the level of adoption and operationalisation has been slow. We're also engaging with ECOWAS on some of their projects.
