By Godfrey Bivbere

The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has applauded the improvement in cargo and ship dwell time at the Lagos Ports.

The minister who gave the commendation at the inauguration of “Operation Free The Ports’ And Terminals Corridors” to be handled by the Port Standing Task Team (PSTT) comprising stakeholders in the maritime industry.

The minister who was represented by the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Margaret Ajani, said that the improvement of vessel movement from five hours at anchorage to 90 minutes to the berthing area, as well as incident reduction from seven to 10 days to between one and four hours, has a positive effect on operations at the port. Amaechi explained that the improvement in that aspect of port operations was a result of the work by the PSTT. He said with the success recorded so far, it is expected that the team will achieve the same level of success with the port access corridor.

According to him, “The Nigerian Port Process Manual, NPPM, will bring everybody’s SOP into focus and we will come together as a team to achieve the desired result. When Moses Fadepe (Coordinator of the team) was speaking earlier, he said previously when a vessel arrives; it takes five hours to navigate from anchorage to the berth. Now with your activities, it now takes 90 minutes and we are not celebrating that.

“It used to take seven to ten days to resolve complaints, now it takes less than four hours to resolve complaints. The achievement may be small but it impacts our ease of doing business.

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“If we are able to get the vessel to berth in 90 minutes, the (Joint inspection) team comes for inspection and comes out in two to three hours and then Customs will come and go and do what they need to do; and then the owner of the goods is able to get his container cleared in two to three days; it is a far cry from the 21 days to six-eight weeks that I know we experience in 2020.

“It takes every one of us here to achieve the desired result and to be able to achieve this; we need to have a Standard Operating Procedure, SOP, that we must follow. The SOP is not conscripting everybody to follow one person’s SOP, you put into cognisance the SOP of all the operating agencies in the port and that is why we are talking about the NPPM,” he noted.

In his welcome address, the Executive Secretary/ Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Shippers Council, NSC, Emmanuel Jime, thanked the team for constituting an “enlarged task team for removing illegal checkpoints and shanties along the port corridors.

“I am particularly excited because of the level of buy-in obtained from the stakeholders coming from both the public and private sectors. It just goes to demonstrate how all of us are eager to rid the ports corridors of the anomalies we are witnessing daily,” he noted.

Vanguard News Nigeria