Nigeria High Commissioner to Ghana, His Excellency, and Musiliu Obanikoro has slammed the operating environment in Nigerian ports for being unfriendly and being a disincentive to trade, even as he stressed that the impediments often discourage many importers from bringing goods into Nigeria through her ports.
Speaking while receiving members of the Maritime Reporters’ Association of Nigeria, (MARAN) who paid him a courtesy visit at his office in Accra, Obanikoro lamented the undue delays in clearing goods at the ports.
Comparing what obtains in Ghanaian ports, he stressed: “We are not even encouraged to want to bring anything to Nigeria. In Ghana here, maximally within four days of your container getting to the port, you have it cleared. In Nigeria, containers spend almost six months in the port. I have been a victim myself, so I am talking authoritatively”, he lamented.
He also said that the regime of levies being imposed by port operators has added more challenges to port users. “If you go to serious countries and you are within the port area, it is as if you are in a different community entirely and everything is put in place to ensure smooth operation for all port users”.
“Now if you look at our ports, every step you take, you have more hurdles to climb and most of these hurdles are man- made. If you say you want to privatize, it must be done in the true sense of privatization. The longer we subject every activity to undue bureaucracy, the more problem will continue to live with us”, he said, adding that “everybody that is bringing in container will factor almost every cost into the final cost of what you are selling. Look at cement, if you take cost of cement landing in Nigeria, the almost 35 to 45 percent that is added is as a result of the problem arising from the port to the final destination”.
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