As a result of the Presidential Task Team’s (PTT) involvement to streamline port operations, vessels now wait 90 minutes at the anchorage instead of six hours, which lowers the overall Ship Turnaround Time (STT).
The STT has now decreased to an average of seven days from its previous value of around 28 days.
The team’s coordinator, Mr. Moses Fadipe, told Vanguard Maritime Report in Lagos that, prior to the team’s participation, problems involving ship captains and their vessels were resolved in an average of seven to ten days. Today, however, handling such issues takes hours.
About 20 years ago, the Danish-based Maritime Anti-Corruption Network, or MACN, petitioned the Nigerian government to declare that, after Argentina and India, Nigeria has one of the world’s most corrupt port systems. The government ordered the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offenses Commission, or ICPC, to conduct an investigation and produce a damning report on operations at the ports in response to the petition.
According to Fadipe, the Commission’s participation resulted in the establishment of the Port Operation Manual (POM), which brought all government agencies working in the port on the same operational platform, and Standard working Procedures (SOP) for those agencies.
He said: “The Nigerian government received this petition from the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network, or MACN, which claimed that, as of 2012, Nigeria was among the world’s most corrupt maritime countries, along with Argentina and India.”And because the petition was so damning, the administration did not take it lightly when it received it. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offenses Commission, or ICPC, was now tasked by the government with looking into the petition.
Thus, in 2013, the ICPC released a study titled the Corruption Risk Assessment study, which included the petition and its conclusions. Furthermore, their research showed that Nigerian ports were among the most corrupt in the world.
“The Nigerian Shippers’ Council, NSC, Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, and all other agencies operating at the ports had to collaborate with ICPC to conduct a search light on the Nigerian maritime sector after the government requested it. Our goal was to examine the entire system, identify any issues, and determine how to address them.”
