NPA’s electronic call-up system (ETO): A review

Decades of infrastructure rot, neglect, and poor or zero maintenance culture coupled with rustled-up management prescriptions had left public infrastructure, including roads, and utilities in total ruins and the tattiest state. Year in, year out, yearly budgets in trillions of naira are made with a focus on building new infrastructure, with little or no provision for maintenance budget.

Among the causalities of this criminal neglect are the Nigerian ports across the country, particularly those in Lagos. The Lagos Port Complex also known as Premiere Port (Apapa Quays is the largest in Nigeria.

Established in 1913, the port was financed by the colonial government, thus becoming the busiest facility for exporting agricultural produce and importation of goods. Today, Nigeria has six seaports, with the Calabar Port, in Cross River State, being the first and oldest in the country.

Apapa, a beautifully carved out port city with all the allurements, well-paved roads and fine buildings, has suffered serious neglect as the roads leading to the ports became a crying shame with the attendant traffic chaos.

The Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), an agency under the Federal Ministry of Transportation, controls the ports and terminals with the primary business as cargo handling. This involves (a) service delivery to commercial vessels arriving our shores in the form of pilotage, towage and mooring services and (b) services to cargo, which include all gamut of activities, comprising cargo receipts, storage within the terminal and delivery to consignees or owners – the later aspect of its operation, which focuses on services to cargoes, was outsourced to private terminal operators since 2005/2006.

Due to massive growth and development over the past decades and location of about 30 tank farms in Apapa, it has become a jungle of hundreds of articulated vehicles and petrol tankers, causing gridlocks in the last couple of years.

The intractable traffic situation has necessitated presidential intervention with the signing of an Executive Order on Ease of Doing Business at the ports and the visit of the then Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, to the facility and subsequent inauguration of a presidential task force to decongest the area that was fast becoming a national embarrassment.

Tankers and articulated vehicles’ queue had extended from Apapa to Onipanu on the Ikorodu expressway, Eko and Ijora bridges, taking the drivers about 40 days and 40 nights to complete their journeys of going into ports to either discharge their containers, commodities or taking them out. In short, between 2017 and 2019, the Apapa traffic was hellish, with it’s debilitating effect on the economy.

Compounding the situation was the road reconstruction and rehabilitation being executed by the NPA in collaboration with Flourmills and Dangote, stretching from Area B Police Station to Apapa port gate along Warehouse Road.

However, the NPA, following the concession project in 2005 by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo administration, had intervened with the ETO initiative to allow for free movement of articulated vehicles in and out of the port complex.

Without doubt, the NPA’s ETO is a phenomenal and timeous intervention that has successfully decongested the ports area. Operationally, the gains of ETO are attested to by stakeholders.

For some critical stakeholders, the successes of ETO, inaugurated on February 27, 2021, are glaring. As a precursor, the NPA management, under the leadership of Mohammed Koko, has introduced a number of initiatives, including iberalisation of barge movement on the waterways through licensing barge operators for cargo evacuation.

It also put in place an empty container policy, equiring shipping lines to build holding bays to house at least 50 to 65 per cent of their monthly containers and removal of at least 80 per cent (equivalent of empty or laden export in returned voyages.)

Closely related are the inelastic nature of port infrastructure and increased cargo inflow into the country -being a direct benefit of the port concession.

Evidently, the action and enforcement regime that followed the oversight by the management also reduced the gridlocks significantly. Then came ETO which harmonised the structures already created to drive the call-up system.

Hitherto, at the peak of the vehicular gridlocks, the cost of transportation of containers within the Lagos metropolis and its environs was in excess of N1.2 million but with ETO, the same movement is now estimated to be around N300,000 while the traffic is now confined to Apapa.

The Electronic call-up project, being executed by a technology company, Messrs. Trucks Transit Parks Limited (TTP), was built in collaboration with Lagos State government that provides enforcement backbone.

Today, the turn-around time for trucks, particularly at the Apapa, is now less than 24 hours while Tin-Can is still above 24 hours for obvious reason of ongoing road reconstruction. Again, the average amount that was paid by truckers at the peak of the gridlocks for empties to access the port was between N150, 000 and N200, 000 per truck and this does not guarantee entry. But to go into the port using the ETO to call up empty containers is only N15, 000, paid from a pre-gate location.

ETO is not all that NPA introduced. The Managing Director , Koko, has also hinted of plans to unveil another application (app) to serve as competitor to the current ETO system.

According to him, the second app is being created to provide Nigerians with an alternative.

For trunkers and other players in the port arena, sanity has returned to Apapa, with daily truck count of about 830 on the average, while Tin-Can is counting about 456 also on the average.

Conscious of efforts of the Federal Government to diversify the economy, NPA introduced some measures, first by ensuring that export containers arrive at the ports through approved barges or jetties.

The Authority also directed terminal operators to prioritize exports considering it’s stannce for compliant export containers not loaded on scheduled voyages. In addition, NPA now handles all logistics relating to arrival of export containers and onboard vessels by terminal operators.

On the checkpoints by security agencies on the port corridor, the NPA management has identified them as tough challenge. The security operatives are alleged to be disrupting the flow of traffic via ‘indiscriminate’ stopping of truck.

But the government parastatals appears to be on top of the situation, as it is learnt that it is already collaborating with the Lagos government to streamline the checkpoints.

Credible and dependable sources confirmed that NPA had sought cooperation and collaboration of the police hgh command with a view to identifying and dismantling illegal checkpoints.

Lagos, on its part as a strategic partner, is reviewing the activities of its operatives to check extortion, even as necessary disciplinary measures are being meted to culpable NPA officials.

With the operation of the electronic call-up system and aunch of the ETO app, which truckers are to book for steamless entry without human interface, Nigeria is on the right track of achieving port efficiency and emplacing the ease of doing business at the ports, as well as taking its rightful place as regional maritime hub.

To the man at the helm of affairs, Koko, and his management team, one cannot but give kudos for this initiative and urge them to consolidate the re-engineering and re-inventing of the wheel agenda.

Adesoji, a lawyer, wrote from Lagos.