Nigeria protests unfair charges from foreign shipping lines

Nigeria will protest the arbitrary and unfair charges on Nigerian bound cargo from foreign shipping lines, the Executive Secretary, Nigerian Shippers Council (NSC) Mr. Hassan Bello has said.

Mr. Bello stated this in Abuja when he received the Monitoring Mission of the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme (ETLS) Task Force to Nigeria in his office.

Some of the unfair and often opaque charges are war insurance premium on Nigerian bound cargo, currency adjustment factor and congestion charges, he said.

“If you are shipping goods into Nigeria, you have to pay war insurance but we are not at war. We don’t even have much cases of piracy. What we have is armed robbery. But these tariffs are unilaterally imposed on Nigeria,” he lamented.

He said going forward; Nigeria will protest these unfair charges at global meetings.

“We are going to international forum, like the global shippers’ forum and complain of these charges. We are having the forum in June 2019 and we are doing that on behalf of the private sector,” he noted. .

According to the ES, these surcharges are supposed to be temporary thus, as soon as the condition disappears, the chargers are supposed to be removed but it has become a permanent feature for Nigeria.

“Even the international maritime bureau reported this year that there is low incidences of the so called piracy in Nigeria. But they are charging us war risk insurance yet nobody is able to tell us the component of these charges in a world that prides itself with transparency, even Europe is opaque on this,” he said.