Gaffe after gaffe at Limassol port
E DII TO RII A L
With all the back-tracking that this ‘pro business’ administration has been doing in the past four years, we would have hoped that with the privatisation of the management at Limassol port things were at last starting to improve.
However, it is disheartening to see how slow, ever, things get done in Cyprus.
The island’s main commercial and passenger port changed hands and is now managed by global operators DP World and Eurogate, yet the goings on in the first ten days of the new management could only be described as shoddy and third world.
On the one hand, we have feeders, service providers and truck drivers moaning about having to do fill in extra paperwork. ( Have we not entered the digital age yet?) Then we had the shipping agents saying they wanted more time to adapt and that the simplified tariffs should revert to the old complicated system. And now, as if in a concerted effort, the customs clearance agents claim that Eurogate’s systems are not compatible with theirs and that “something should be done”.
There are clearly two major problems that should be dealt with swiftly – either the local ‘establishment’, many of whom have been generously compensated for abandoning their port monopolies, could not be bothered with adapting to the new order of things; or, as some opposition parties claim, Eurogate has not done its work properly, despite the nine months it had to organise itself. So, which is it?
if
In the first case, if the incompetence lies barely with the old establishment, they should step aside and the free market should allow anyone to enter the sector; or, if the latter is the case, then the government should punish the operator in the form of financial penalties and undertaking the cost of whatever systems upgrades and training is necessary.
It is a shame that instead of utilising his time for more productive work, such as driving the promotional campaign to attract more shipping companies to Cyprus, the Minister of Transport has to deal with such menial issues, when senior civil servants should have been monitoring the situation from the beginning.
Consumers and business are fed up with these problems, mainly attributable to incompetence and lack of communication.
Unfortunately, some do not even regard the public’s needs, as is the case of the grumpy taxi drivers, whose alleged demise the Transport Minister is also ‘obliged’ to deal with.
The main bone of contention is that of the so-called pirates who are unlicensed and pick up passengers from Larnaca and Paphos airports at a fraction of what the licensed cabbies charge. Well, no wonder. You have to pay an arm and leg to get from either airport to Nicosia or to Ayia Napa, and yet the airports operator is tolerant to this bullying that has drastically reduced the pick-up areas at arrivals gates for the public, where taxi drivers take up almost all the parking slots.
This is a free market. If the government is not prepared to subsidise the taxi fares for Joe Public, then why the hell should the Minister intervene?