The Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) has said, it is working with the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to streamline export documentation in a bid to reduce red tape and ensure that export cargo moved as quickly as possible.
This was disclosed by the managing director, Mohammed Bello-Koko, while speaking in Abuja on Tuesday.
According to him, NPA, Customs, and other government agencies are working together to deploy the National Single Window, a platform that would make it easier, and will help to reduce the quantum of documents that an exporter has to fill before his or her export cargo can leave the port.
Bello-Koko, who decried the documentation that an exporter had to fill in Nigerian Ports is very cumbersome, said the NPA may be interested in the volume while another agency may be interested in the type of cargo to enable it to charge the tariff.
He said, with National Single Window, all the information that all the government agencies need would be located in one single platform. He added that, it is due to this reason that the NPA is working to set up 10 export processing terminals that will have Customs, SON, NAFDAC, and other government agencies involved in export processing terminals at one location.
The NPA boss, also stated that shippers’ have adopted alternative means of moving their containers from the mother port to off-dock location.
He further disclosed that the business of using barges to move containers from the port to off-dock locations has grown to about N10 billion annual business.
Bello-Koko said, since the introduction of cargo movement using barges over 500,000 twenty-foot equivalent units of container (TEUs) have been moved through the channels from one location to the another.
He said the container barge industry, which has grown to about N10 billion annual businesses, has also created over 25,000 direct and indirect jobs.
According to him, the NPA in the past was relying completely on cargo evacuation by road, until it realised that moving 100 percent of imports and export by road is not efficient or sustainable.
“But working with the Nigerian Railway Corporations (NRC), the NPA ensured that the rail lines were connected to the port. We also introduced barge operation for movement of cargoes from one location to another off-dock location,” he said.
On the vandalisation of port infrastructure, the NPA boss said, Nigeria is losing a lot of money to the issue of stolen fairway buoys on the port channels.
“We have been to forums where shipping companies would decline to visit Nigerian ports especially Warri and Calabar due to lack of buoys on the channels. These ships need the buoys to aid their navigation along the channel, and the absence of which could make a vessel go aground. This was why the NPA has been appealing to port communities and educating them on the importance of the buoys to port operations as well as the cost implication of not having them on the channel,” he said.
