The gains of declining inflation rate in the country may about to be reversed as the chaos in Apapa has led to a tripling of the cost of transportation into and out of the nation’s premier port. Businesses have seen their profit margins suddenly come under significant pressure from a 300 percent in cost of transportation.
Despite several promises, including a 72-hour ultimatum given by acting president Yemi Osinbajo 25 days ago, Apapa remains in chaos and this is coming at a significant cost to commuters and business owners even as the Federal and state Governments continue to smile to the banks with billions of revenue collected from the businesses it was supposed to facilitate.
While the federal government is carried away with its ease of doing business rhetoric, businesses are suffering and collapsing from the federal government’s inability to bring sanity at the most critical trade point into and out of the country.
The quest to grow non-oil exports is already suffering as exporters now find it difficult to export their produce through the ports while the profit margins of businesses come under significant pressure from the rising cost of bringing in goods through the ports.
For the importers and exporters, bad roads, traffic gridlock, congestion in and outside the ports, extortion by security agencies among others, have increased their cost by over 300 percent, sources have told BusinessDay.
An importer who has his business within Apapa told BusinessDay that his cost of moving a 20-foot container from the Sifax Group depot to his office, which is also within Apapa has risen from between N180,000 and N190,000 to between N295,000 and N300,000, representing almost 150 percent increase in his freight cost.
“It has been a big problem these days and the experience in getting to Apapa has become a nightmare,” said Tony Anakebe, a port operator and member of freight forwarders association of Nigeria, adding, “businesses continue to slide to their lowest level; it takes us almost two weeks to get our containers loaded after finishing with the customs.”
Yusu Gambo, a clearing agent explained that freight costs have gone so high because the turnaround time of trucks has increased significantly due to the congestion and gridlock, which have made movement in and out of the ports extremely difficult.
“Before now, a truck driver could go on two to three trips a day within Lagos; now he can only do one trip. Outside Lagos, he could do two times in a week, today he can only do once in a month,” Sambo explained.
He disclosed that transporting a 40-footer container from Lagos to Onitsha now costs an importer N1.3 million, up from between N320,000 and N340,000 before the congestion in Apapa. Moving the same container from Lagos to Shagamu which used to cost N120,000 to N150,000, is now N750,000 to N800,000.
For an importer to move his goods from Lagos to Ilorin now costs him between N860,000 and N900,000, up from N220,000 to N260,000 he or she used to pay, just as transportation of same size container to Abuja now costs N1.3 million to N1.4 million, up from N420,000.
All these increases are putting pressure on the businesses but, according to Sambo, the person at the receiving end is the consumer to whom the importer transfers the additional costs. Again, the implication of all these is that imported items will continue to be very expensive and unaffordable to many consumers.
“Until all these anomalies are addressed, Nigeria will continue to be too expensive a market for foreign direct investment which the country needs badly at the moment,” noted Emmanuel Ameke, a port operator. “Ease of doing business which has remained a hoax, especially at the ports, must be seen as an economic necessity and not political tool for winning elections,” he added.
It is now almost one month since the vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, gave an order for trailers and tankers to leave the roads and bridges which have become their loading bays, but instead of the situation improving, it is getting worse.
Apparently, it is becoming clear that the federal government has no clue to the traffic jigsaw in Apapa, fuelling the thinking in some quarters that there are too many vested interests in this truck business that are bent on frustrating efforts at finding sustainable solution to the Apapa problem.
The trailers and tankers have come back so forcefully that they have not only over-stepped the one-lane order which confines them to a single file on the roads, but they have also come back to the bridges which they were chased away and forbidden from parking on.
“It has been all motion without movement in the search for solution to Apapa problem. The rehabilitation of the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, the completion of the 500-capacity trailer park on the expressway, the expansion of the Ahmed Bola Tinubu loading bay in Orile are all good approaches to solving the nagging problem, but it has all been mere propaganda,” Ameke lamented.
Osinbajo’s 72-hour directive, leading to collaborative efforts of the Police, Nigeria Navy, Nigeria Army, the Nigeria Air Force, FRSC and the NSCDC, LASTMA, LASEMA, Container truck drivers, National Association of Road Transport Owners, NUPENG, Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria to clear the gridlock has only succeeded in becoming a lame-duck and a toothless bull-dog, unable to fly and to bite.
CHUKA UROKO
