Business
Nigerian ports: Progress and Purloining
On a sweltering morning in West Africa’s largest port, an official from a Swiss company watched as a container lifted from a ship was transported towards a warehouse for inspection. Inside the bustling Apapa quay, one of three docks in the Lagos port complex, the container was first checked using state-of-the art scanners installed as part of a $210 million upgrade that began in 2004.
It should have been cleared in a matter of minutes. Instead, several hours later, dockyard workers were carrying out a laborious manual inspection. “The port has modern equipment which the bosses at the top have been quite meticulous in installing, but there is no willpower on the ground to switch to quicker methods. For every minute the ship is delayed, the more demurrage charges officials can collect,” says the foreign official, whose company works in five other African countries.
According to internal documents seen by The Africa Report, the clearing of all goods in Nigeria’s seven port complexes is initiated online, but at least 80% of cargo still ends up being inspected manually. In 2004, the country began implementing an overhaul of the crumbling port infrastructure. The adoption of a “landlord model” saw the Nigeria Ports Authority award 20 concessions to companies by the end of 2006.
Five years after the reforms began in earnest, cargo throughput more than doubled to some 75 million tons, according to the Nigerian Port Authority (NPA). “Nigeria is one of the few countries in Africa successfully rolling out private-public partnerships. It’s certainly the way forward in Africa,” says Cornelis Van Der Waal of Cape Town-based analysts Frost & Sullivan.
The concession rounds drew global multinationals such as Julius Berger, Global Infrastructure and Addax Logistics. Shippers say waiting times and port security have improved, with one trader saying vandalism of containers had all but vanished. Authorities are also pushing ahead with the building of two deep-sea ports. Last year the government approved $1.35 billion for the Lekki deep-sea port, which is expected to handle 4m tn of cargo annually.
Red tape tangles
Still, much remains to be done. Policy flip-flopping has continued. From March, car importers will face a hike in import duties from 10% to 35% as Nigeria aims to become the first sub-Saharan African country since South Africa to build a domestic car manufacturing base.
Such moves, ostensibly designed to stimulate the local economy, have angered traders. “There is not even a single car manufacturer in Nigeria, there’s no electricity and you’re talking about building cars? How?” asks a businessman who imports cars from Germany and who requested anonymity.
A damning internal report last year by the Bureau of Public Procurement uncovered systematic corruption across all the country’s ports. Red tape remains the single biggest headache. In the Niger Delta’s Onne port, 74 signatures are required to clear a cargo, the report said.
Owners abandon cargo
According to the report, “There are just too many departments in the port. A few years ago there was a form for the fire brigade, then that disappeared.” “Now you need to get clearance from the bomb squad, on top of the intelligence services and the police. And believe me, if you don’t pay up, you won’t get clearance,” says one Lagos-based importer who claims soaring costs caused all his foreign clients to quit in recent years.
Insiders told The Africa Report exorbitant demurrage charges sometimes lead to owners abandoning their goods.
“It can be for the simplest thing, and your cargo will be delayed for weeks. It’s true, sometimes for weeks the port authorities will just tell you the server is down.
“If it gets to a point where it becomes overtime cargo, some people just cut their losses and leave the cargo,” the chief executive of a local company says. Equally worrying, according to the re- port, were signs of state monopoly. An investigation is underway in Onne port where “concessions have been given exclusively to Intels Nigeria Ltd as a terminal operator exclusively for all oil and gas sector imports.” Some see potential for progress.
Seven years ago, a frustrated Alhaji Sani relocated his import-export business from Apapa in Lagos to Benin’s Cotonou, frustrated with obsolete equipment and corruption. On a visit last year, he was struck by the improvements. “I decided to start doing business here again,” he says.
Copyright The Africa Report 2014