The National Director, Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Nigeria (CILT) Mr. Paul Ndibe has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to sustain the gain so far achieved by the Jonathan’s administration in the area of rail transport.
Ndibe who was speaking in Lagos stated that part of what the government should do was to think of connectivity depending on the route, the axle weight and whether or not the rail sector should be commercialized.
According to him,” Government should look into these aspects. There is a lot of support for the railway, government should sustain it but then look at the more critical areas that it might give priority in terms of the continuous development of the railways”.
“Expansion of the routes, are we going to the industrial areas or to the population centres? So, government should take these decisions and facilitate growth in that aspect. It is not something that government will fund and the route development into industrial centres, the companies that will occupy those areas should be able to fund a transportation system that will facilitate their operations”.
He regretted that the Lekki Deep Sea port that is under construction had no rail connection linking it to the other parts of the country so as to facilitate easy evacuation of consignments from the ports when operational urging the government to look at the interest groups there and see them as a consortium so that even the private sector could be engaged to fund the laying of transportation network like the rail to aid the activity in that Deep Sea port.
“So, if government can look at it, it is already being funded. They are development of the ports but they are not developing the road network. At the end of the day, we may be faced with what we have in Tincan ports that there is no rail connection, then you are thinking of containers going there. Everything is now containerized into the seaport with the oil tank farms that are established there”.
“How are you going to pick up the fuel delivery? Are there pipelines to other locations that you don’t have tank farms that tankers can just go and pick up instead of coming to drive into the port as we have in Apapa? Look at the tank farms, all the trucks could go there and pick up consignment. Must all of them go there? It is a problem we now encounter, so we should correct it in respect of the Lekki Deep Sea Port”, he said.
