Following the recent full reopening of the reconstructed Wharf Road, certain road haulage operators in the maritime sector are taking actions to boost the benefits of the vital link to and from the port city of Apapa, easing the nagging Lagos ports access roads gridlock considerably.
Truckers, under the aegis of the influential amalgam, the Containerised Truck Owners, the Association of Maritime Truck Owners and Container Truck Owners Association of Nigeria, said they were determined to provide efficacious antidote to eliminate the gridlock totally, not just to help their businesses recover from the devastation of the gridlock at its zenith, but to also check driver fatigue and other threats to the health and lives of road users, and residents of Apapa and other locations that had been worst hit by the traffic anomaly.
The Containerised Truck Owners’ statement, signed by Chief Remi Ogungbemi and Alhaji Wasiu Oloruntoyin, on behalf of AMATO and COTOAN, respectively, stated, “In view of the serious challenges that are militating against the stability and survival of our business as containerised truck operators in ports, we have, therefore, carefully studied and identified the root causes of the challenges, which are as follows:
Lack of automation system to regulate/control movement of trucks that are going into the ports, either to pick imported cargoes, taking exports into the ports or returning empty containers into the ports, which informed the reason why almost all the trucks thronged along access roads into the ports at the same time.
There is also the issue of the condemnable whopping sums of money that are exchanging hands, day and night, between truckers, as bribe givers on the one hand, and security operatives or their collecting agents, as the receivers of the bribes at various points along the access roads into the ports. This could either be through voluntary offers by the truckers in order to gain undeserved advantageous positions on the truck queues, lining the roads and bridges, or the bribes the trucks offer the security operatives or their agents, either under duress, or as a result of intimidation through verbal and/or physical abuses.
Others are absence of modern and befitting public terminals, which has seen a large number of truckers without garages parking on the roads and bridges.
“However, believing that every problem has a solution or expiry date, we have, therefore, resolved to hold the bull by the horn to politely, gently, peacefully, and lawfully relate with relevant authorities to achieve a peaceful and enabling working environment,” the associations said.
They noted that the Nigerian Ports Authority, as the technical regulator of the ports, had informed operators that it had approved the manual call-up of trucks as not just a condition for trucks to access the ports, but also as a method to regulate/control movement of trucks into the
ports.
“We have, therefore, resolved to imbibe and test-run the system,” the AMATO-COTOAN initiative
stated.
