National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) has called for a review comprehensive review of agreements with concessionaires at the seaports with a view to determining their effectiveness.
NAGAFF said that absence of enabling laws to protect the nation’s interest during and after the 2006 seaports concession programme have turned the sector into a haven for capital flight.
It would be recalled that the federal government had embarked on the concession of its ports with expectations that the concession would boost socio-economic development.
Chief Eugene Nweke, president, NAGAFF however told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that the concession is creating more problems than it is solving.
Nweke alleged that billions of naira are carried out of Nigeria daily while lamenting that the figures could not be estimated because certain government agencies are colluding with the concessionaires.
The NAGAFF boss decried the uncontrolled increase of cost of clearing goods at the nation’s ports occasioned by the concession regime, but without the needed efficient services by the port concessionaires.
“What spurs this capital flight is that the private operators must recoup the money they pay to NPA and NIMASA. Even the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) cannot estimate the amount lost. As at today, only the Nigeria Customer Service (NCS) can tell how much is made from the ports, but they will never tell the public the whole truth. The ports are dying. Our ports have turned open cheque for capital flight and the issue needs urgent attention,” he said.
Recently at a half-year Ministerial briefing, Senator Idris Umar, minister of Transport commended the port concessionaires for investing some $925 million in cargo handling equipments and terminals development between 2006 to March 2013.
Reacting to the Minister’s presentation, Nweke said, when compared with what obtains in other climes, it becomes a mockery, “let’s consider and borrow a leave from Weifang port (managed by the government of China), located in the Shandong province in China where the ports authority has concerted, signed to invest a whooping sum of USD$1.6 Billion to be expended in 3 yrs (2014 – 2017) just to raise its capacity to handle over 50 million metric tons (MT) of cargo per annum.
In a written response to the minister’s presentation, Nweke, stated that the clamour for the review of the ports Concession Agreements entered into with the private operators since 2006 depicts an urgency to right the inadequacies noticed in the agreements.
In the views of most port users, “the Nigerian Ports Concession experience appears to be nurtured mostly on a political interest rather than for the collective economic interest of the people”.
“A cursory look into the Concession Agreements entered between Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE), the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and different private port operators in 2006, speaks volume of an unstructured concession agreement that was hurriedly packaged, speedily concluded and signed into effect, without adequate consideration to evolving robust, prompt and sustainable economic benefits in the future.
“One major omission observed in most of the prevailing concession Agreements as structured by these Agencies of the Government, is the absence of a legal framework that would have ushered in and governed the regime of private ports operations, and the consequent effects of this omission continue to live with us, especially, the non-structuring of an official template for ports services tariff-settings and the non constitution of a commercial ports service regulator prior to or during the concession exercise,” he said.
Similar case with national networks as number of empty ducts, number of unutilized fiber, all underutilized due to no front end outflow” the ISPs said
ISPs argued that huge portion of ISP revenue goes towards Connectivity Charges and tower rentals, because, according to them international bandwidth rates are one of the highest in Nigeria compared to rest of the world, national long distance and metro network cost is exorbitantly high and tower rental cost is also much higher as compare to other developing countries because infrastructure providers have unique problems like power, theft and other security challenges.