The Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) has said that the cost of doing business in the Nigerian port sector is high compared to other African countries.
The Executive Secretary of the council, Pius Akutah, said that NSC was working towards reducing bottlenecks that had inhibited trade facilitation processes in Nigerian port.
The executive secretary explained during a partnership visit to the National Coordination Office of the African Free Continental Trade Agreement (AfFCTA) office in Abuja that there were poor infrastructure, cumbersome procedures, restrictions and high tariffs in doing business in general in the port, noting that all these had contributed to the problems that the country was facing today.
Akutah, who stressed that trade facilitation was key to the economic development of the country, added that the council had taken some steps to help ease trade facilitation processes, which include a dispute resolution initiative and a port automation system, among others.
He explained: “I want to say that the Nigerian Shippers Council has taken some measures to facilitate trade and reduce some of the bottlenecks. Some of the initiatives are ongoing, like the informal trade, which has to be captured for the purpose of data.
“AfFCTA is a platform that is needed today to correct all of these abnormalities and we are encouraged that AfFCTA is on the right track. We are going to see how we will work together to deal with these issues as far as they involve intra-trade among African countries.
“We are also looking at the issue of tariffs; we are setting up guidelines for stakeholder standard operating procedures in the sector.
Recently, we have negotiated with the maritime workers union and the shipping companies and terminal operators for minimum standards for entry and exit of maritime workers, which has been a challenge for so many years; that has been put to rest now.
“We have another agreement, which, hopefully, the minister will validate next week. This will certainly reduce the amount of friction and the number of times that people have to go on industrial action in the sector due to poor packages.”
Also, the Coordinator of the AfFCTA Nigeria office, Mr Segun Awolowo, noted that it was important for the country to position itself properly to benefit from the AfFCTA. He advised the Federal Government to ease trade facilitation processes in order to enable the export sector of the economy to grow and gain from the AfFCTA.
Awolowo, therefore commended the NSC for their efforts in growing the country’s economy, highlighting the Council’s role in trade facilitation apart from their regulatory duties.
He noted: “Trade facilitation is extremely important because that is the only way we can really benefit from trade agreements such as the AfFCTA.”
Recall that stakeholders had said that the $29 trillion potential income gains in the expected trade during the trade implementation was being threatened by crisis across Africa, lack of preparedness of Nigeria and tariff barriers.