Port Access Roads: How Agents Propel FG into Action
That the access roads to the nation’s seaports, especially the ones leading to Nigeria’s busiest ports in Lagos are in deplorable condition is an understatement. The state of the roads is nothing to write home about. The roads are so bad that a yet-to-be estimated number of persons have lost their lives while using the roads. Others have been injured or maimed. The number of deaths, injured or maimed is besides the yet-to-be quantified properties that were lost to the bad port access roads.
The sorry poor state of the roads leading to the ports did not start today. It precedes some of the present actors in the Federal Ministry of Transport and its parasatals. To that extent, it can be argued that they are not the cause of the problem. However, they cannot be exonerated from what has become a nightmare for motorists and others who do business in Apapa. Under their watch, the roads have gone from bad to worse. They are aware of the parlous state of the port access roads but they did little or nothing to change the narratives that have become the subject of discussion in several quarters within and outside the maritime industry.
They pretend to be doing something but in reality they are doing nothing. They are only paying lip service. They choose to say the right words for public consumption, return to their cosy cars, offices, and homes and wait for another opportunity to mouth the usual rhetoric. This is the reasons why it is taking months nay years to get approval from the Federal Ministry of Works to rehabilitate the port access roads. Yet the Minister of Transportation Right Hon. Rotimi Amaechi and his Works and Housing counterpart, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN meet in the Federal Executive Council (FEC) see each virtually every week. Every Wednesday, Amaechi and Fashola sit together for hours in the council chambers, yet a parastatal under Amaechi cannot secure approval to rehabilitate rods leading to where the Federal Government rake in billions of naira daily. It is now the Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Ms. Hadiza Bala Usman is trying to secure approval to get the funds required to reconstruct the port access roads. How else can one define a government that is not in hurry to do the needful in bringing the change required in the maritime industry?
But for the unity of purpose displayed by the two leading organisations for freight forwarders and licensed customs agents, the National Associa- tion of Government Approved Licensed Customs Agents (NAGAFF) and the Association of Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) respectively, the these actors in government did not see any urgency in addressing the challenges plaguing maritime industry. Unlike in the past, the founder of NAGAFF, Dr. Boniface Aniebonam and the National President of ANLCA, Prince Olayiwola Shittu, for once, were on the same page on the need to down tools as a way of drawing government attention to the poor access roads. But for these two men who showed leadership, the helmsmen in the Federal Ministry of Transport and the parasatals under its supervision would not have embark on any frenzy of activities since last weekend as if it is today they knew that the access roads to Apapa are in a very bad shape.