Agents of shipping lines have petitioned Nigerian Ports Authourity (NPA) alleging unbridled extortion and intimidation on the part of employees of some departments in the organisation whose responsibilities include boarding of visiting ships.
At the center of what is turning out to be a scandal are personnel of the Pollution Control Department in Port Harcourt port who have been accused of employing several ways of corruptly enriching themselves at the expense of the foreign vessels that visit the port.
The lid was blow off the act recently when an agent of one of the shipping lines who could no longer stomach the serial extortion sent a protest letter to the port manager, Port Harcourt port, Mr Dele Alabi on what he called “unwarranted attitude of staff of pollution control department.”
In the letter which was sighted by Shipping Position Weekly, pollution control department staff were accused of usually capitalizing on the ignorance of foreign captains about some laws to entrap them and use that as an opportunity to request for assorted items from the ship. These items include: paints, grease, black oil, lubricating oil, etc from the captains. These items are reportedly sold to buyers who are already waiting by the quay side.
The letter which was written by a shipping agent (names withheld) was the climax of several attempts to ensure that the concerned personnel stop, but to no avail. It reads in part: “the problem is that these your staff in boarding of vessel, are supposed to be correcting and educating the foreign captains properly about our local laws, but instead they use that as an opportunity for imposing fines on the vessels’ masters and request for paints, Grease, Black oil, Lub oil etc, this does not give us good image…..”
According to a staff of one of the shipping companies, the staff of pollution control department usually come in a team of about 5-6 persons on board a vessel, sometimes even with the buyer of these items. They allegedly look for flimsy excuses such as seeing a camonglage shorts/ vests in the captain’s cabin, discovering a dagger in the drawer of one of the crew etc.
“They use this as an excuse to say they the crew have committed an offence against Nigerian laws. Sometimes, they engage the captain or chief engineer or chief officer in prolonged lecture as to what MARPOL laws says. They are then fined arbitrarily, asking for different things in order for them to escape our laws, hey intimidate the captains, the captains are now forced to release these items to them”. “The most embarrassing thing is that buyers of these items sometimes go on board to chose the type of items that they want”, the source disclosed.
When contacted by our correspondent, port manager, Mr Alabi confirmed that he has received such a complaint. According to him, “I almost sacked one of the staff of that department, and move all of them out, but for the intervention of the two house unions.”
He however blamed the shipping agents for collaborating with the NPA personnel and for sometimes perpetrating the act themselves. It’s a case of who gets to the vessel first, he said, even as he assured that authorities have taken steps to stop such acts in the port.
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