The Greenview Development Nigeria Limited (GDNL) operators of Terminal ‘E’, in Apapa port has called for more synergy between government agencies, especially, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigerian Shippers’ Council(NSC) in other to address the difficulty being faced by trucks wanting to access the ports.
The Managing Director of GDNL, Mr. Akin Omole who said this in a chat with newsmen at the terminal in Apapa, said that with the synergy, there would be significant achievement in the area of trucks assessing the ports.
Omole however commended the Presidential Task Team on Apapa traffic gridlock for creating a special window for manufactures to load their cargoes unhindered.
“I believe that with the intervention of the task team that the federal government instituted with the collaboration of NPA and NSC, there could be a lot more cohesion and synergy among those agencies, there would have been a significant achievement in the truck access and out of the ports”, he said.
Although he explained that even with the window, sometimes the traffic situation is also chaotic.
“The window we were making reference to is the one giving to manufacturers and the occupants of this Apapa Terminal E, they are mostly manufacturers, Dangote Sugar, Dangote Salt, Flour and of course the Gypsum that comes in here”
“So the manufactures were given a window between 12am till 3am for us to be able to bring in our trucks. Sometimes, everything goes as planned and we will be able to bring in as many trucks as we are able to bring and some other time the road becomes very chaotic”, he noted.
According to him, “the primary issue with congestion is that it impacts the entire supply chain and port operations. Check for instance, as I just recently explained if the vessel comes alongside with 40,000 metric tons of cargos and the trucks that are supposed to come and convey the cargos are not able to assess the ports, then that vessel will be there longer than necessary”
“And as you know the longer the vessel stays at the ports, the more demurrages the vessel pays; it is not only containers that pay demurrages, vessels also pay demurrage and it is paid in Dollars that is also a major challenge” he lamented.
