Following the inability of the Federal Government to pay serious attention to the development of the nation’s seaports and ensure their full reform, the ports have failed to make an impressive contribution to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), analysts say.
To them, the contribution of Nigeria’s ports to GDP is not well captured as it was usually lumped into the transport sector’s contribution to GDP, which accounted for 1.8 percent of GDP in 2018, making the ports’ contribution very small.
However, statistics show that revenue from the ports is about the third- highest, just behind oil and revenue generated by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS). For instance, the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) declared revenue of N300 billion in 2017 as against N162.2 billion in 2016, while the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), declared revenue of over N1 trillion in 2018.
Also, reports say that ports enable the world, countries, corporates and individuals to make a lot of money. The port facilitates the movement of goods from where they are produced to where they are needed, and it is a wealth creator as well as an agent of economic growth and development.
“Government is building new ports in Lekki and Badagry but the old ports are not being upgraded to international standard. The Apapa ports have become a dungeon of sort for importers’ and exporters’ nightmare,” Ray Echebiri, veteran media practitioner, told newsmen in Lagos recently.
Speaking on the presentation titled, “Why the Ports Matter and Why Journalists Should Pay Attention,” Echebiri, who pointed out that Singaporean ports account for 7 percent of the GDP, said government’s neglect had created inefficient and uncompetitive ports in Nigeria. This, he said, was evident in the fact that port infrastructure including port access roads are fast deteriorating.
According to him, Nigeria does not have any development plan for the ports as various administrations have not paid enough attention to developing them.
Explaining further, Echebiri said the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration’s National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy did not give the port a mention.
“President Goodluck Jonathan’s Priority Project Policies and Programme, which listed 41 priority projects for the transport system, did not list any single port project among the priority list. It only had Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the port subsector, focused on linking all the seaports and ICDs to rail and roads,” Echebiri said.
“The Buhari’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) only mentioned the ports in passing as the plan does not have any strategy for the development of the nation’s seaports,” he added.
He however noted that the ERGP recognised the fact that the nation’s transport infrastructure stock including the ports is inadequate for the size of the economy. “The ERGP also noted that the nation’s transport infrastructure lags behind peers.”
In a different forum, Frank Ojadi, a university don, bemoaned the non-capturing of the maritime sector in the GDP, describing it as worrisome and disturbing.
In his lecture in Lagos, the Lagos Business School (LBS) lecturer described the Nigerian maritime sector as weak and unlikely to compete favourably with contemporaries around the world.
According to him, “you cannot pin down what the Nigerian maritime industry contributes to the GDP, and this is because 80 to 90 percent of the vessels that come into the country are foreign-owned.
“The foreign vessel owners repatriate the profit accruing from the shipping business in Nigeria to their various countries, thereby making it difficult for Nigeria to retain the money in the economy,” Ojadi added.
AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE
