The President, African Federation of Freight Forwarders, Chief Lexzy Nwangwu has decried the African governments’ preference for the foreign freight forwarders to the indigenous ones in the movement of cargo inflow to Africa.
Nwangwu who expressed his displeasure over the development frowned at a situation where governments in Africa which bring in between 80% to 90% of the cargo handed over all those cargoes to foreigners leaving the indigenous ones to rot away in debt.
He frowned at inadequate local capacity to turn around the fortunes of the local ship owners and operators so as to better the lot of African practitioners.
According to him,”Looking at the African maritime economy or rather the blue economy, I noticed that there is a lot of lapses in Africa. Ghana has 96 fishing Trawlers, all of them are owned by foreigners. Togo has 300 fishermen only for them to catch fish and send to Katanga for smoking. These are serious things.
From the government side, they are talking about piracy, but I am not looking at piracy, I am looking at the maritime security as it affects the freight forwarders. A situation where a government that brings in between 80% to 90% of the cargo throughput in Africa through project cargo hands over all these cargo to foreign freight forwarders and leave the indigenous freight forwarders to suffer in total penury is maritime terrorism. I look at it as maritime terrorism”.
Chief Nwangwu noted that until Africans, Nigerians in particular began to remove the logistics aspect if the turnkey projects and award to indigenes, African maritime industry would not grow because they make the Africans conduit pipe.
” I look at a situation where the indigenous freight forwarders shall be involved in the outbound clearing of our oil, a situation where in the international fora, for outbound clearing, freight forwarders are paid $1per barrel and Nigeria is supposed to be having 2.2 to 2.3 million barrels per day meaning that 2.2 to 2.3 million dollars will come into our banks every day. If that is done, for one year, banks will be cap in hand begging for people to take loan because they cannot manage it without giving it out.
“Banks that cannot create credit must die. If these monies come into Nigerian banks, money from clearing of all this project cargoes, money from outbound clearing of our solid mineral and crude oil come into our banks, money from insurance, banks will have so much to invest internally. We can’t be talking of unemployment because it will now be possible for banks to give soft loans for individual support”, he said.
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