Facilitating seamless cargo movement using inter-modal transport system

Following the underdeveloped state of the nation’s railway system and inland waterway transportation, Nigeria’s port industry, has over the years, depended largely on roads to move import and export cargoes in and out of the seaports. Consequently, about 95 percent of all import and export cargoes originating or destined for the seaports, are moved by road, creating huge cost related problems to cargo owners, writes AMAKA ANAGOR-EWUZIE.

In the last seven years, doing business at the two major economic gateways in Nigeria (Apapa and Tin-Can Island seaports) has been a hard nut to crack.

This was largely due to the dilapidated state of road infrastructure around the Apapa metropolis, which made human and cargo movement in and out of the ports difficult.

Consequently, the poor state of the roads holds serious negative economic implications for the port business, largely due to the fact that over 95 percent of the entire cargo that comes into Apapa port are moved by road to the importers’ warehouses while in the case of Tin-Can port, 100 percent of the entire consignments are moved by road.

Nigerian port users rely on roads to move their import and export cargo either to the ports or from the ports to their warehouses, following the underdeveloped state of the nation’s rail and inland waterway system.

In Apapa for instance, about 5,000 trucks come to Apapa ports every day to strive for businesses that only 1,500 trucks were needed to do, leaving the other 3,500 roaming around the port environment in search of business.

This situation results in uncontrollable traffic gridlock within the port environment and also leads to huge man hour loss as well as delay in delivery of cleared consignments from the ports to the importers’ warehouses.

Pundits believed that the railway and inland waters, if fully developed and linked to the ports, would serve as alternative means of transporting cargoes from the ports to the hinterlands and from the hinterlands to the ports.

Currently, Nigeria’s rail system consists of 3,505 kilometers of gauge lines and 479 kilometers of standard gauge lines. The country has two major Cape-gauge rail lines that include Western Line, which connects Lagos on the Bight of Benin to Nguru in the northern state of Yobe, covering over a distance of 1,126 kilometers and the Eastern Line, which connects Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta to Maiduguri in the northeastern state of Borno, near the border with Chad.

In terms of inland waters, Nigeria is endowed with a large resource of waterways spanning 10,000 kilometers with about 3,800 kilometers navigable areas. This connects 28 states, meaning that those states can be accessed through water.

Given these huge rail and waterway networks, industry close watchers, believed that for Nigeria to achieve seamless movement of cargo at the port vis-à-vis port efficiency, the country needs a transport system that link the three major transportation modes including rail, inland waterways and roads known as intermodal transport system.

According to them, having a functional inter-modal transport system that ensures effective movement of cargo from the port using road, rail and inland waterways, would help to eliminate the congestion problems associated with Apapa and Tin-Can Island Ports.

There is need for the port system to be effectively connected to the railway, inland waterways and road transportation modes to achieve effective movement of cargo at the ports, Dakuku Peterside, director general of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), said.

Effective intermodal connection to the port, according to him, will result to port efficiency, facilitates seamless transportation of goods and creates immeasurable positive effect on the economy.

“The efficiency of a port is measured by the quantity of import and export cargoes handled in a day. A port with bad roads and underdeveloped rail facilities will have low cargo throughput.  While ships start and end their journey in ports, the cargoes originate and end up far from the ports. This implies that without the connection of other modes of transport to the port, the system becomes crippled and the sea transport becomes inefficient,” Peterside further said.

The quality of the rail and road transport connection to a port, he pointed out, impacts on the cargo throughput of the port. “However, some port managers especially those in developing countries are yet to understand the importance of an effective intermodal connectivity to efficiency at the ports.”

Currently, the turnaround time of vessels in most African ports is too high probably due to inefficiency and lack of necessary transport infrastructure which leads to longer dwell time for vessels and cargoes in the ports. This results to high cost for importers in form of demurrage, which eventually is passed over to the final consumers.

For instance, research has it that transport cost add between 2 to 5 percent to the final cost of imported cargoes in developed countries, but in developing countries like Nigeria, it adds as much as 15 to 50 percent in.

Hadiza Bala Usman, managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), who has shown commitment to using effective intermodal transport system to move cargoes from the nation’s seaports, said that NPA under her management is keen to prioritising the movement of cargo by rail.

Usman, who pointed out the need to design and prioritise rail network in linking the Ports to the hinterland, with Lagos as the take off point, said that the Federal Ministry of Transport needs to provide clear timeline and percentages of cargoes that should be moved through the different nooses of transportation, which includes inland waters, road and rail line.

“We need to determine the percentages to be apportioned to a particular transportation mode because all cargoes cannot be moved by road.  For instance, we need to determine that 30 percent of our cargoes must go through the rail and commit about three to four years timeline to deploy the necessary resources towards building the infrastructure needed to achieve this,” Usman added.

Also, Adamu Biu, former executive secretary of Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC), said recently in forum in Lagos, that the current state of the port access roads makes it difficult to move cargoes out of the port, said that there was need to connect the Tin-Can Island port to the national rail line.

“We have to consider using the rail system to move containers. In France for instance, the railway system was incorporated into the port system such that as the vessel berths in the seaside, cargo would be discharged directly from the ship into the rail without having to deal with trucks littering the roads located around the port and this would reduce pressure on our roads,” Biu added.

Bui however warned the Federal Government on the need to upgrade the existing port infrastructure, to not only improve on cargo movement, but to avoid Nigerian ports experiencing the difficulties that took place back in the days of the ‘Cement Amanda’ of the 70s.

In his view, Frank Ojadi, a professor at the Lagos Business School, who recently took a holistic analysis of the role of deep seaport in national development using Lekki as a case study, said that the federal and state governments need to begin to think of how to deploy good road and rail networks as well as inland navigation to ports like Lekki, to handle the huge traffic that would be created by the seaport.

Also, Bolaji Akinola, chief executive officer, Ships and Ports Communications, said the multi-billion dollar projects cited in the Lekki Free Zone corridor, may face access challenges, if plans to use road and rail infrastructure to evacuate cargoes from the seaport, were not immediately executed.

According to him, “the record year for containers in Nigeria was 2014, with throughput of 1.6 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs). This number has been the highest volume recorded so far in the history of this country. Ever since, the throughput had plunged, but I see this year matching 2014 records.

“The records are already there because the throughput in first quarter 2018 is as good as what was recorded in the same period of 2014, which means that our economy is rebounding.”

Noting that the Lagos ports terminals could handle 1.69 million TEU of containers conveniently with the Lagos ports current capacities put at about 2 million TEUs, Akinola said that deep seaport is welcome because of its futuristic importance but timely resolution of the infrastructural problems, was necessary to avoid future traffic challenges.

Therefore, Nigeria has no other options, than developing its transport system to accommodate rail and inland waterways, if the problems and cost associated with cargo movement by road, will be reduced to the barest minimum.