Stakeholders Outline Benefits of 4th Mainland Bridge

As the Lagos State Government continues to delay the proposed fourth mainland bridge project, stakeholders in the maritime sector of the economy have enumerated its benefits to Lagos and Nigeria as a whole.

The stakeholders under the aegis of the Port Consultative Council (PCC) said the enormous benefits of constructing another bridge to link the Lagos mainland with the island cannot be over emphasised.

Chairman of PCC, Chief Kunle Folarin, who stated this in Lagos, noted that the fourth mainland bridge should link the multi-billion naira Lagos deep seaport presently under construction at Lekki, off the Lagos-Epe Expressway.

Folarin argued that if the bridge is linked to the Lekki deep seaport, there would be easy evacuation of cargo from the terminals unlike what is presently happening in Apapa seaport.

According to the PCC Chairman, adequate transport corridors such as rail, road and pipelines should be put in place to serve the proposed port. This would save port operators the agony of traffic bottlenecks encountered along the access roads to the Tin Can Island Port and the Lagos Port Complex, situated in the port city of Apapa.

He stated that the problem at the Tin Can Island Port Complex was due to the fact that the transport corridors to the port had become inadequate to handle traffic.

His words: “When you now build a port in Lekki, you must be thinking of how you empty the traffic that the port would generate. Will it join the existing level of traffic or should alternative routes be created? Where will the trucks pass without constituting a nuisance to other road users? These and many more questions should task the present promoters of the Lekii deep seaports. They must ask the relevant questions and provide the right answers otherwise they will finish constructing the port and discover that they have another problem staring them on the face”

As a way out, Folarin suggested that there should be 11 lanes of dual carriageway, starting from the proposed port and creating a fourth mainland bridge which would empty the traffic through the Lagos metropolis.

THISDAY had reported that the Lekki deep seaport is a 41-month project expected to be inaugurated in 2019. When completed, the port could handle container vessels of up to 10,000 Twenty Foot Equivalent (TEUs) with an annual cargo throughput (imports and exports) capacity of 1.5 million tonnes.