Chairman of Nigerian Ports Consultative Council (NPCC); Otunba Kunle Folarin last week spoke with Shipping Position Daily's Dapo Olawuni on the maritime road map which the Council recently submitted to President Muhammadu Buhari. He assured that the report will not be abandoned. He also spoke on how to bring businesses back to Nigerian ports. Enjoy.
Chairman of Nigerian Ports Consultative Council (NPCC); Otunba Kunle Folarin last week spoke with Shipping Position Daily's Dapo Olawuni on the maritime road map which the Council recently submitted to President Muhammadu Buhari. He assured that the report will not be abandoned. He also spoke on how to bring businesses back to Nigerian ports. Enjoy.
“There is no way to cut corners, if you are handling an hazardous cargo, you must have safety helmets, mouth guards, if you work in the frozen areas you must have tracks, boots, gloves, wear warm clothing and so on”—Otunba Kunle Folarin, Chairman, Nigerian Ports Consultative Council (NPCC)
How far with the maritime road map that you promised giving to President Muhammadu Buhari?
The document has been submitted and what will be done about it will depend on the Presidency, but I am sure that they will soon invite us, it is still highly classified for now, when you submit a document at that level, you don't start to discuss it anymore. So, to answer your question I will tell you the job has been completed, views collated and it has been forwarded to the President.
Many people complained that they were not carried along during the roundtable
If you have a port industry in which you have over 30 people who command respect in the industry, people who head various segments of the maritime sector, people who have over 30 years’ experience as a professional, and they are all involved in the project, what other segments do you want again? It means that everybody has been carried along. If you look again at the profile and calibre of people involved in this maritime road map, you will realise that you don’t necessarily need to get importers and exporters to be there when you already have the Nigerian Shippers Council in the roundtable and they are the ones looking after importers and exporters, every segment from even the Universities where involved, the public service, ministries, port authority, maritime law, navigation, captains of ships, ship owners and so on, so there was no neglect whatsoever, nobody was missing.
What is your take on the allegations by dockworkers that stevedoring companies do not have kits?
?I do not agree fully with the dockworkers because some of the stevedoring companies work under terminal operators, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) provides the guidelines for the working operations of the stevedoring companies registered with them, when it comes to kitting procedures and standard, there is no way to cut corners, if you are handling an hazardous cargo you must have safety helmets, mouth guards, if you work in the frozen areas you must have tracks, boots, gloves, wear warm clothing and so on. These are basic requirements that must be provided, so it depends on where the operation is taking place, if it is in a terminal and the terminal operators are directly doing the stevedoring work, like APMT for example, they have to provide all the kits to do the work, but if the terminal operator is sub-contracting the dock labour, then the stevedore will be required to kit the dockworkers, but if you are talking about the stevedore, in other words you are saying it is better when the terminal operators were in charge than the stevedores. We have intervened on several occasions, we want to see standard in the industry, this involves safety, skill acquisition and efficiency, the stevedores have told us that most of these dock labour, particularly those who wear helmets and rubber boots or gloves, they don't want to wear it; they supply them these materials and that will be the last you see of the kits, so the accusation is both ways. In most cases we have seen the Stevedores supply Dockworkers with kits, sometimes they make it a big event on inauguration of Dockworkers kits, we have to look at it from both angles and appeal that it is very much in the interest of both the employers and the employee to comply with international standard in kitting, for health reasons and for safety reasons.
What is the way out of the face-off between NPA and Maritime Workers Union over payment of tally clerks and on board security men?
To me it is a very important issue in the sense that you must not deny any worker of its remunerations, even if you disagreed with some elements in the contract of the job, as long as the service has been performed they have to be paid. On the other hand, the issue even goes beyond payment of what has been worked for, what is the quality and reasonableness, the demand, or why should we have tally clerk security? I think there must be a balance between what you get from an interested party like the shipowners, terminal operators and even the workers, there must be an independent report of operations because the document that is going to be provided will be useful to many parties that are not in the port system, if it becomes a matter of litigation about whether the cargo was fully discharged or in what condition, I believe the Admiralty Court will also want to see any report to confirm the cargo was shorthanded or damaged, so there must be a document and that document could come as a report of a cargo surveyor or a tally clerk or tally sheet. The tally sheet is signed by the shipowner, the captain has to sign it because he needs evidence that the cargo was landed and the quantity, so in anyway you want to look at it, we need an independent report to confirm or ascertain the quantity or quality of cargoes that were discharged. From that point of view, we have to device a means whereby we have an independent body that will produce a document acceptable for litigation, for arbitration, for insurance and even for financial documents, and all parties will agree to it because it was independently produced, it is not a situation of 'he who pays the piper dictates the tunes'
In view of recent happenings, would you still say that port reforms have been a success?
We should start from where we were coming from, it was a situation whereby productivity was at its lowest ebb, we were not even competitive in the region, that was when we began to see cargo diversion, productivity was bad, the cost of doing business was higher than other countries in the region, over time, Nigerian importers started preferring these neighbouring country ports because of efficiency and cost of doing business, these were the initial challenges we had before port reforms. We had bureaucratic government agencies, there were 16 agencies in the ports and you have to comply with requirement of each of them, this was not helping. We also had heavy investments in cargo handling equipment by the Nigerian Ports Authority, there was heavy remuneration of staff that were about 13,000 at that time, so government felt these money on equipment should be used on port development rather than on equipment, government felt that we have an over bloated work force and there was need to prune down and save money to develop other parts of the ports, this was what brought about port reforms.
The question now is, have these challenges disappeared?
Yes, productivity has increased, cargo throughput has increased, and the turnaround time of vessels has improved than when it was compared with pre-concession. The second thing is the cost of doing business has reduced. Because of the increase in productivity, the charter fees for ships coming to Nigeria has dropped, for instance there are some categories of vessels that are not on regular liner services, for example; bulk carriers, frozen fish and so on, they are all chatter vessels and the fees have reduced because productivity has increased. Other areas that constitute port cost are even heavier than what terminal operators are charging. The second aspect of doing business at the port is unethical behaviours, that is, too much of face to face contacts, if the Nigerian maritime sector is IT-driven the way should be, there is no reason for any cargo interest to come into the port at all, all documents and movement of the cargoes can be checked online, the importer will know when the import is arriving, to know whether it has discharged and sailed, so that he can cross-check the information from his clearing agent, he will even be able to traced if duty has been paid to the bank. The port community has been linked, when information sharing is certain, definitely the room for manoeuvring and unethical behaviours will reduce considerably. So IT solution is not yet achieved at our ports and this is increasing the cost of business, it is causing delays that transforms into other costs, for instance, the demurrage collected by haulage or transporters, the cargo must have been loaded but it cannot come out of the port because documentation have not been completed, it leads to other things in the corridor of the port, whereas if we have got an IT-driven system, all these delays would have been eliminated completely.
Many vessels and shippers have abandoned out ports, how would you advise the government to bring them back?
Some of the solutions are one that we are already forwarding to the government. Naming Nigeria as a cargo destination is achievable; we have to look at it, why are they diverting cargo from Nigeria? The reason is very clear, we have to strengthen our maritime domain security, a ship coming into Nigeria, if he feels comfortable that while awaiting berth he can stay at our anchorage without being vulnerable to piracy and armed robbery attacks, this is a plus, most of these vessels usually steam out in the night and come back by the day, who pays for the diesel cost for moving around? We have to make sure that our maritime domain is secured. Secondly we have to modernize our ports to be competitive, we must understand that ships don't just come to discharge cargoes and go away, they might come for supplies like fresh waters, bunkers, maintenance of minor electrical system, or dry-docking and ship repairs, but do we have all these things? We must have an efficient service sector for shipping which includes carrying out repairs, undergoing dry docking and receiving supplies that will keep the journey going. We also have to look at port infrastructures in common user areas, illuminate the ports so that we can work 24 hours, make the berths deep enough to take in bigger vessels?.
Will the Treasury Single Account (TSA) help our maritime agencies?
A similar regime of financial control has been with us in the last 20 years, it is not new, at least up till 1998, I know for sure that all payments are domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria, so it is not new, though there might be a new way they want to administer it today, but the policy is not a new one, it is very workable but it depends on how they perceive it to be done today. But, if you ask if the policy is right? Yes it is, government wants to control, instead of some agencies having up to 18 accounts at nearly all Nigerian banks, not necessarily for fraudulent reasons, but for the purpose of control we need the TSA. But whether you want to exempt some organisation or not depends on their operations, they would need to be operational, they don't have to wait until money is transferred from one bank in Abuja before they buy diesel or do things that are on daily basis, there could be some special dispensation for those who are semi-operational or fully operational agencies, government should look into their case.
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