Against the background of increasing difficulty businesses and residences are experiencing in Apapa as a result of the daily traffic gridlock, the Organised Private Sector (OPS) has charged the Federal and Lagos State governments to stop treating symptoms but tackle the root causes.
According to the OPS, the governments must increase local capacity for refined petroleum products and return to haulage of the products by rail, instead of transporting the products by road.
Apapa, Nigeria’s premier port city, where over 57 petroleum tank farms are also located, ranks among the worst business environments in the world.
With about 3,000 tankers heading for Lagos daily, most of them coming to Apapa to lift petroleum products, roads and bridges leading to the ports community are blocked to motorists and residents almost permanently, forcing commuters to spend hours in the gridlock.
Efforts by successive administrations in Lagos to bring sanity to this environment have produced little or no results, as the tankers remain on the roads and bridges.
Recently, the governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, on a visit to Apapa, to assess the intractable situation, decried the blockade of access roads by tankers and container bearing trucks, a development which he described as unacceptable, but which the state government appears helpless to deal with.
“As immediate palliative, we would set up a task force that would involve most of our security agencies, in- cluding the police, and we would do a 24/7 monitor of the traffic. We would pay more attention to enforcement. We are going to give incentives to our law en- forcement officers to ensure that the traffic law is obeyed,” Ambode said.
Olusegun Oshinowo, the director-general of Nigerian Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) who decried the negative impact of what is happening in Apapa on the national economy, said what the government was doing amounted to “treating symptoms” rather than the root cause of the problem.
Oshinowo said “cost of business in Apapa has in- creased. People are relocat- ing from Apapa to other locations. It is not as if they planned this, but the pain and suffering have attained a level where they just have to take a decision, even for workers, it has become ex- cruciating and it is telling on their health.
CHUKA UROKO & JOSHUA BASSEY
