The National Association of Road Transport Owners(NARTO) has urged the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to set up a task force to ensure full implementation of the order on creation of holding bays for their empty containers.
The Lagos State Chairman, Dry Cargo, NARTO, Alhaji Adbul Inuwa disclosed this yesterday during a chat with Shipping Position Daily in Lagos.
It will be recalled that the Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Hadiza Bala Usman had at a recent stakeholders meeting threatened sanctions against some shipping lines for not complying with the directive of providing a holding bay.
The NARTO chieftain commended the NPA boss for the ultimatum, but added that this has to be enforced.
"The initiative on sanctioning some shipping lines for not providing holding bays was a good one. The ultimatum is long overdue; we have expected that long before now. My question now is, since they (NPA) gave them that ultimatum, did they put any task force in place. They gave ultimatum without putting task force in place to monitor. If they say they have a task force in place, where are they and what is their report so far?
Since that ultimatum by the MD till now we have not seen anything on that regards. Don't forget that at that forum, it was agreed that all the holding bays by the shipping lines will be published in some of the national dailies, but we are yet to see anything", he added.
Alhaji Inuwa maintained that the task force should be charged with the responsibility of ensuring that this ultimatum is strictly adhered to by the shipping companies.
"There should be a task force to monitor the activities of the shipping companies. Now as I am speaking with you, for more than one week TICT trucks have not been entering inside the ports to drop their empty containers", he alleged.
He also advised NPA to make use of empty bonded terminals as holding bays ,adding that Ikorodu Lighter Terminal and other port around should be used to drop empty containers.
"We have told them that if these shipping companies don't have holding bays, they should work with bonded terminals. There are so many bonded terminals outside the ports that are empty. Kirikiri phase 4 is empty; they can drop empty containers there while they use barges to ship them to the ports. What these shipping companies are doing here, is that what they do in their own countries?. I think there are so many solutions to these problems"
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