Importers had diverted the cargoes meant for Nigerian ports to neighbouring countries’ seaports before the inauguration of Lekki Deep Sea Port.
over the deep sea port like the one Pinnacle Oil has which is about 11km into the sea – big mother vessels will come, discharge through pipes to the land depot terminal, Mr Bello-Koko declared: “We do and they call it an SPS. It is a Single Port Model that is mostly used for liquid cargoes, whereby the vessels do not need to come on shore to either load or offload.
“We give approvals for locations of those things, we also do coordinate, we also know when their vessels are coming in, we need to regulate their in and out, they are also using our channels.
“So whether you have an SPM, it is the NPA’s channels that those vessels would come through and the regulatory functions are as it relates to their marine activities, but as for the evacuation and loading, that is between them and Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Limited and whoever the importers are.”
On NPA’s involvement with the Lekki Port, the CEO recalled that initially the idea was for NPA to have about 20 to 25 per cent, but felt there was need to reduce government involvement in private ports and reduce our equity to about 5 per cent. “But irrespective of the equity that NPA owns in that port, we still remain the regulator. We are the port regulator, we regulate the port activities and there will be revenue coming from there.
“Of course, we know the issue of the land, there is contention as to who owns the land from a certain distance between the ocean and the land. It is owned by the government or NPA, but that was sorted out between Lagos State and the Lekki Deep Sea Port so that equity that we gave actually introduced statutory cover to the fact that you cannot have a private port in Nigeria and government does not have equity in it. So that is the essence of that equity.’
Shedding more light on barge operations, he explained that it was part of strategies to use multi-modal means of transportation in the maritime sector.
The NPA MD said:” So for the barge operations, what we did, first of all, is that we realized that for us to get multi modal means of transportation, you need to provide multiple ways of transportation apart from the road, which is the normal one.
“We are looking at rail, sea, and we have encouraged barge operations. We spoke with the terminal operators and a few individuals that had a few barges to say, ‘let us give you few license to start moving cargoes via barges.’ “But of course, we gave them Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and conditions and they have been doing that over a year without the authority charging them anything and we realised that the total percentage in terms of cargo being moved by barges increased astronomically from 10 per cent, it doubled over.
“So we now have situations whereby containers and other cargo are being moved from the ports to off dock locations and other jetties and it is really encouraging and that has reduced the number of trucks that are on the road.
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