Nigeria Ports Authority [NPA] is poised to leverage Nigeria’s status as Africa’s biggest economy to actualize the country’s maritime hub status in the region through investments in modern deep seaports, its Acting Managing Director Mohammed Bello-Koko has said.
Speaking in Abeokuta at the first retreat for NPA’s reconstituted Board of Directors with the theme “Expanding the Frontiers of Service Excellence,” Bello-Koko made said this would attract large merchant vessels with multiple socio-economic benefits for Nigeria as well as boost ports’ revenue.
He also said a lot has been done in the last few months to resolve most of the identified constraints to efficient movement of cargoes to and from port locations.
Nigeria, the acting MD said, “accounts for about 70 percent of cargoes imported into West and Central Africa and the country controls an impressive stretch of the Atlantic Ocean. Nigeria’s rich aquatic endowments and her border with landlocked nations make development of deep seaports a huge potential revenue earner for the nation.”
He also said the move towards earning the status of hub in the region is in line with the new vision statement which was adopted at the recent NPA Management retreat, “To be the Maritime Logistics Hub for Sustainable Port System in Africa.”
He said recent interventions made by the authority led to significant improvement in terms of ship and cargo dwell time at the ports.
He, however, said “some of the benchmarks we are yet to achieve are dependent on externalities and variables that require concerted inter-agency actions, which the Authority, despite dogged efforts, is yet to optimally achieve owing to systemic administrative constraints and red tapism, including conflicting directives from the agencies operating within the port value chain and reporting to different supervising Ministries with jurisdictional overlaps and duplication of functions.”
