The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Nigeria has said that Nigeria as a nation is relying heavily upon the trucks plying the roads to grow her economy and drive down inflation through cost effectiveness in economic regulation of her ports.
The president of the institute, Mr. Ibrahim Jibril who stated this in a keynote address he delivered at the 2018 National Conference and Annual General Meeting of the institute in Lagos on Friday argued that a look at the manufacturing sector, the construction sites and supply routes to the market would confirm the fact that Nigerians relied heavily on trucks followed by other road mobile units like vans, cars, Keke Napep, Motorcycles (Okada), Donkeys and hand trucks for the conveyance of goods.
Jibril noted that the railways which used to contribute over 40% of the freight tonnage movements in Nigeria in the 1960 and 1970 had over two decades ago fallen to a low level of less than 4% of tonnage haulage adding that the inland waterways usage for internal mobility and distribution was still at their informal level and aggregated to less than 1% of the volume as according to him, Nigeria was yet to put many of the inland ports being developed into any meaningful use especially when one evaluates the state of readiness of such inland ports like the one at Onitsha or Lokoja which had recently been commissioned.
According to him, “Our aviation sector is beginning to pick up. Our locally generated traffic in this sector composed of the heavy electoral materials lifted during the last national election circle. The other sizeable component relates to the consignments from the Courier services and the online shopping shipments. It should be recognized that there are small pockets of aggregate tonnes of loads from very informal sector, carrying farm produce to the city centres. In the light of the scenario painted above, it is therefore clear that it is just the road trucks that we, as a nation, had relied upon to grow our economy, hope to drive down inflation through cost effectiveness in economic regulation of our ports but not with the pricing of the freight for the truck services”.
He however regretted that the nation’s inability to fashion out an ideal way to effectively deploy these trucks which the economy relied upon for over 85% of its physical distribution system, constitutes a challenge to efficient productivity, prudence in the deployment of the mobile units, ease of doing business, cost saving, as well as good logistics planning among others.
“In fact, whatever dissatisfying adjective you chose to qualify your frustration of our waste of resources in the idling of these trucks, in the introduction of congestion charges by a shipping company, would simply fit in. It is this concern that fueled the choice for the theme of our discussion today, “Trucks in Freight logistics: Issues in Nigeria Economic Development”, he said.
The CILT boss pointed out that the situation where Nigeria found itself in the freight logistics equation can simply be described as unfortunate and unhealthy economically adding that it is the concern for a change in policy that the institute decided to discuss the place of trucks in the nation’s freight logistics system and to find a way for its improvement.
He said, “To the investors, their expected returns are not being met. To the crews, they do no longer work the expected hours a week or a trip as they are held up on the queue around Lagos for upwards of 168 hours in just going to deliver empty containers. According to the International Labour Organization, 40 working hours a week has been established whereas some of the crews of these trucks spend this time, 4 times over at a stretch in a week or so in only accessing the ports to either drop or lift up loads. If you integrate this length of time in accessing the port into the time for leaving the port, the crew would have spent over 336 hours continuous working hours, without signing off duty.
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, we are simply looking at the duration these people are on duty, irrespective of whether or not they are actually moving their trucks. This fact is to highlight the difficulties of this time as we learn that in the course of the last two months, not less than three truck drivers had died while waiting on the queue and on active duty. As a professional body for this industry, we are concerned and worried about these developments”.
He therefore expressed the hope that when the views of the various speakers on the subject matter at the two day event were aggregated and way out of the menace were communicated to the federal government, the government and the people would be able to start afresh to do things right.
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