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The Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) has assured that it will resolve every pending rift with truck drivers for effective cargo management. This is coming on the heels of a protest by truck drivers in the Lagos Port Complex Apapa on Tuesday and Wednesday, against a new traffic management policy introduced by the NPA on the return of empty containers to the port.
The NPA policy expects truck drivers to stop bringing empty containers to the port, but to first go to the holding-bays of shipping companies to drop them before coming to the port to pick laden containers.
Responding to BusinessDay questions on the issue, Isah Suwaid, assistant general manager, corporate and strategic communications of the NPA, said traffic management in Apapa was originally domiciled with the NPA, but what Nigerian Navy was doing was an interim solution, which the NPA had taken over and introduced its own solution.
Suwaid said the management of the NPA, who embarked on tour of the Apapa port on Thursday, discovered that the 3,000 containers said to have been trapped at the port due to the protest, had started being cleared out of the port.
According to Suwaid, normalcy has returned to the port as we speak as truckers now go about their normal business while the Nigerian Police Force and the NPA security are working hand-in-hand to ease the traffic situation on the port gate.
“The NPA has started talking to the concerned shipping companies and terminal operators to ensure the situation is brought under control. We had meeting with Maersk Line and we had another stakeholders’ engagement to arrest the situation on Thursday,” Suwaid said in a telephone interview.
Recall that the truck drivers disrupted container movement between Monday and Wednesday, in reaction to taken over of traffic control in the port area by the NPA from the Navy. This upturned the Navy’s truck call-up system and created a new arrangement that truckers felt was not favourable to them.
Sulaiman Adeoye, a truck driver, said that the new policy led the truck drivers to down tools on Tuesday and Wednesday in protest.
“They (NPA) just suddenly came on Monday and said that all trucks must first go to shipping company’s holding-bay from where they are to be called into the port. Unfortunately, this is contrary to the arrangement being implemented by the Navy, which has worked well and has eliminated the Apapa gridlock,” he said.
He said that the new arrangement forces all trucks to go the holding-bays without a modality on how they are to come into the port.
Confirming this, Remi Ogungbemi, chairman, Association of Maritime Truck Owners (AMATO), said the truckers are agitated by the new policy because ‘it is still alien.’
“NPA is saying the terminal operators should give them the list of containers they want to load and number of trucks they are expected to load the previous day before they start coming the next day. But this does not go down well with the truckers because they are confined to a situation whereby some people stay on the road for days. So that is what is generating the issue,” he said.
