The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), Barr. Hassan Bello has exonerated the government agencies and service providers operating in the Nigerian seaports from being responsible for the high cost of doing business at the ports.
Bello who disclosed this at a forum in Lagos said that there was no one government agency or service provider that could be blamed for the high cost of doing business at the nation’s seaports even as he blamed the development on distortions.
He therefore insisted that government must come to do what it had to do to improve on the infrastructure for export, create access to finance for people who want to access it, provide market for the exporters and many other things it needed to do to assist the sector.
While recalling that Nigerian journalists most of the time tends to compare the cost of doing business in Ghanaian ports with that of Nigeria, the NSC boss observed that such should not be the case as the operating conditions in the two nations were not the same challenging the journalists to carry out thorough research in this regard.
He expressed happiness with the terminal operators who he described as very important partners adding that,” We have changed the way we do shipping, the efficiency is there and that was why I said sometime that we need a conducive atmosphere for private capital to thrive which we don’t have here”.
According to him,” I have discussed with many journalists and they told me the port is very expensive, why is it in Ghana, it is ten Naira while in Nigeria, it is twenty? But are the operating conditions the same? In Ghana do you have this gridlock? You wouldn’t have that, if you have that gridlock, it will be a national problem and so, that is why sometimes we don’t just talk like that. There is no one agency or one important service provider that is responsible for the cost in the port, what we have are distortions and it behooves on the journalists to do research and that is how you are becoming very important.
“And so, government needs to come and do what it supposed to do, government must improve on infrastructure, the infrastructure must be there for export, government must make access to finance for people who want to access it, government must provide access to market for us, government must deal with standardization issues and so many other things the government needs to do because the right atmosphere there simply means, even the cost of freight will go down if our containers that come laddened also leave laddened with our goods”.
For Shippers’ Council, Bello noted that the introduction of dry port was very important because effort was being targeted at bringing shipping to the doorstep of shippers even as he said that for a local place like Kaduna where you have Sesame seed and some processed agricultural products, it should be made a centre for export with a refrigerated warehouse, general warehouse as well as other facilities so that all those agricultural products could be processed there.
While expressing happiness that Kaduna Dry Port was working as a port of destination and a port of origin, he added that, “We are still working with some international organizations so that it will have appropriate recognition and one can consign one’s cargo to Kaduna with True Bill of Lading or the Combine Bill of Lading in which case, it is also the same thing when you are exporting. As we are speaking, Jos is about 70% completed and the beauty of Jos is that we are near the airport and the concessionaires in Jos are signing a very beautiful contract that will enable the airport to be used to lift vegetable to the centre of Europe”.
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