By Hauwa Ali
The managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Mohammed Bello-Koko, says many shipping companies are avoiding to use eastern ports because equipments needed to guide their movements in the waters, known as bouys are not available which could cause vessels to run aground.
Bello-koko who said this while briefing newsmen in Abuja recently, said that to deploy one bouy costs between N12 million and N20 million.
According to him, some members of the communities were responsible for theft of the devices made available with at least 25 stolen this year alone.
The NPA boss added that vandals are attracted to the buoys because some of them have solar panels and sensors.
He said, “There is a beacon light there that flashes at night. So the first thing they do is to vandalise that sensor, and then, you just have iron that has no light, and they can just drag it off without the sensors.”
“We can monitor it if it is not disconnected. A times, we send in our boats to go round scouting for it. And to also be fair to the communities, we have had some instances where the buoys were naturally taken away by nature, they went adrift, they ended up on the shore of some communities.
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“And to be fair to them, they have actually called us a couple of times to tell us that there’s a buoy that has gone adrift and it is in our community. And we thank them for that.
“We believe probably the communities do not even know the individuals that are involved in these activities. So, we are monitoring the buoys. And that’s how we got to know how many are stolen any day it’s stolen.
“Because the captains are also taking vessels in and out of the water channels, they will naturally know when they can’t find the beacons on the buoys, meaning that something is missing, and they normally report it.”
He said the Calabar and Onne Ports are now ISO-certified and are seeing substantial increase in import and export traffic.
He added that Onne was becoming the fastest-growing port in Nigeria, he said, “In terms of percentage input, Onne has done 11,800 metric tons half of this year. We are seeing that the increase in percentage is high, probably because it’s easier to do business in Onne now.
“And because we have deployed more equipment in Onne, more personnel, we have paid attention to ensure that we made the port more competitive. In terms of export also, there’s an export processing terminal within Onne itself.”
He said that everything was being done to make the ports in the eastern corridor, including Calabar, Port Harcourt, Onne, and Warri, attractive to investors.
He added that West Africa Container Terminal (WACT) operating in Onne has invested more than $100m in terminal expansion, deployment of equipment and technology.
