Maritime
Customs, NPA to form committee on over-night cargoes
By Richards Adeniyi
THE Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Col. Hammeed Ali (retired) finally agreed to honour the call of the Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Hadiza Bala Usman to discuss the way forward over the issue of the overnight containers at the ports that had led to serious congestion over the available spaces.
It will be recalled that the NPA MD had tried in the past months trying to convince the Customs helmsman to come to her rescue to decongest the port but all her efforts were not accorded the urgent attention that it deserved.
The NPA boss even approached the Minister of Transportation to assist her in appealing to the Customs Comptroller-General to come to her aid in decongesting the ports that had been littered by over-night cargo containers.
Over-night cargoes are cargoes that had been at the ports for more than 28 days after their arrival and which have been abandoned by their owners and which has now attracted huge demurrages over time.
The terminals where these cargoes are were not in a hurry to release the cargoes because of the demurrage that these cargoes had attracted to the terminals.
However, with the closure of the nation’s borders by the Federal Government with her neighbours and the insistence that Benin Republic must now use the Nigeria seaport for her good destined to the Benin Republic, Nigerian importers who had been using the Benin Republic to transship their goods were now compelled as a result of the border closure to now stem all their imports to the Nigerian seaports through the Lagos Port Complex.
The terminal operators who initially were not too keen to release the over-night cargoes in their premises because of the huge demurrage that they had helped to collect from the importers of these over-night cargoes suddenly supported the move of the MD of the Nigerian Ports Authority now that many more containers are coming to Nigeria as a result of the closure of the borders with Benin Republic.
However, the Comptroller-General recently visited Lagos – the Tin Can port in Lagos over the seizure of 34 containers of expired rice at the Tin Can port, the team hurriedly made an emergency call to the Nigerian Ports Authority, Western Port to honour the persistent call of the Hadiza Bala Usman, the NPA boss over the issue of overnight cargoes at the port which had consumed all the available spaces at the port which had eventually led to port congestion.
It must however, be placed on record that most of the containers abandoned at the port belong to the Federal Government as investigations by our correspondent have reported in the past.
It will be recalled that during the Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, he imported over 800 containers into the port which contained the materials for the revival of the country’s electrification but all the containers were abandoned and some were later auctioned.
